I’m an hobbyist that got interested in SDR and bought a LimeSDR to play around with. I read the tutorials, went through the github repositories, the doxygen documentation, read the datasheets and everything. A special thanks to @andrewback : your tutorials were great and allowed me to get more and more complex with SDR technology. However, I would like to make one step further and program my own software, just to do stuff without LimeSuite GUI, i.e., creating a simple radio receiver for local radio signals just for fun, with my own scripts and GUI and not interacting with LimeSuite GUI. Quite probably it will feature in the LimeSDR Made Easy posts anytime soon, but right now I can’t find that much documentation on where to start.
I remember long time ago I had a microcontrollers course at uni and we had an IDE to deal with it. I can’t find anything similar to LimeSDR in the documentation. And I never touched embedded systems programming ever time since, so I’m awfully green on the matter.
I also checked the SDRAngel project but it is too complex for me to follow at the moment.
Can someone just indicate me the first steps on how to start programming such thing? Software required and maybe some attentions to it? I have some knowledge on the programming itself, but a “Program your own application using a LimeSDR: first steps”, or something like that, would be very very appreciated. Thanks!
P.S: I’m planning to do the application in python if possible, or c++. Maybe the GUI using c++/qt or PyQT5 for practice.
Thank you for the kind words, Pedro! However, all credit must go to my colleague, Karl, who authored the LimeSDR Made Simple series.
GNU Radio Companion and Pothos GUI are probably the nearest thing you’ll get to an IDE for SDR. Although of course visual tools. If you’re writing code I think you should just use whatever IDE you prefer.
Basic code tutorials are planned and so keep a look out for new instalments of LimeSDR Made Simple over the coming months.
as i also had some problems to get into the complex SDR stuff, i want to share my current project. So far i developed a little C++ application using QT and QTCreator as IDE. I decided to use SoapySDR as it is quite easy to use.
There is of course a lot of room for improvement of the application, but it works quite well:
Furthermore the examples for the USRPs from Ettus also helped to get some insight on programming SDRs:
Hopefully this will help others to develop applications. Currently i plan to extend my little application towards a basic QPSK transceiver with all sorts of carrier synchronization and/or a small tracking generator in order to measure some filter curves
@CrystalMatrix i am using QT Creator but not the device creation. I actually don’t know what the device creation is, but it seems like u only need it for embedded devices
I’m not sure where to start, but I need an app that can be a frequency counter and waveform generator. Its for a Rife-type use.
A programmer I know said he thought it wouldn’t be too hard, still hasn’t worked on it much. I think he thinks it’s harder than he expected, or he’s going about in a more difficult way. He wanted to code it from scratch in Haskell, but I don’t think he knows how the code should be written to control the LimeSDR, how to create different waveforms, etc.
I only know html/css. I wish I knew how to do it myself, or could find help with this. I don’t have much money.
