Having a great hardware platform is one thing, but as any experienced engineer will tell you, this is only half of the story and you also need solid software support to realise the true potential of that hardware. So it’s hardly surprising that we’ve had quite a few backers asking for more details of the driver software for LimeSDR and whether it will support this application or that application.

Fortunately, with quite a bit of experience under our belt we knew from the outset just how crucial software support is. And with this in mind we enlisted the help of Josh Blum in putting together a driver infrastructure for not just LimeSDR, but any board that is based around the LMS7002M FPRF transceiver. Which could be a derivative of LimeSDR — given that it’s fully open source hardware and anyone is free to fork the design — or it could be a completely new board.

For those not in the know, Josh is the original author of the WYSIWYG flowgraph editor for SDR applications, GNU Radio Companion. In addition to being the creator of dataflow programming software suite, Pothos — and SoapySDR, the vendor and platform neutral SDR support library.

SoapySDR was the obvious choice for providing the LimeSDR host API, not just because it strives to be vendor and platform neutral, but because thanks to its extensible nature it provides lots of other great features, such as compatibility with tons of existing apps via support for the UHD API.

In a new post up on the Myriad-RF blog, Josh takes us through the Lime Suite architecture, introducing the various components, connection interface and registry, support for custom hardware, GUI and SDR APIs. This will hopefully answer a lot of those questions and should any remain, please post them to the new Lime Suite category on the Myriad-RF forums.

Enjoy!

Andrew and the LimeSDR team