I am a beginner with GRC. I have installed GRC 3.10.12 and would like to use LimeSDR. How do I select which channel/antenna to use for LimeSDR Source?
Thank you in advance.
Piero
Hi,
To select channel/antenna for LimeSDR Source block, you must open the block by double clicking it. Look for Antenna Port/Data channel indexes fields. If the antenna and channel parameter fields are left empty, LimeSDR Source block will auto select suitable antenna and data channel.
If you need anything specific, please provide more details.
Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately on Soapy LimeSDR I just see the fields that are in the following figures. I don’t find anything related to Antenna Port or something similar. It may be that I can select the antenna by sending a proper command to the “cmd” port, but I don’t find any example showing ho to do.
Can I have some help?
Regards, Piero
Soapy LimeSDR Source/Sink plugins should also auto configure channel RX/TX directions by default. If you are ok with a static LimeSDR configuration, you can pass key=value pair in the Device argument field options that are missing in the GUI. To find out all available key=value pairs, you can invoke soapySDRUtil --probe command into command line/terminal while the device is plugged in PC.
However, it is worth to note that the soapy LimeSDR Source and Sink plugins have not been updated in a long while. Therefore, you might encounter bugs and other runtime problems, especially with the newer LimeSDR boards. Instead, you can try out LimeSuiteNG Source and LimeSuiteNG Sink plugins. You will need to build and install these plugins manually. This page provides LimeSuiteNG Source/Sink plugin build and install steps for Windows and Linux platforms.
Arnius, thank to your indications I was able to build and install LimeSuiteNG and the plugins for GRC. Thank you again!
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Hi Arnius, I was supposing to have correctly installed LimeSuiteNG, but I discovered that if I execute the flowgraph in GRC I get this error message:
Generating: “/home/piero/prova1.py”
Executing: /usr/bin/python3 -u /home/piero/prova1.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/piero/prova1.py”, line 22, in
from gnuradio import limesuiteng
ImportError: cannot import name ‘limesuiteng’ from ‘gnuradio’ (/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gnuradio/init.py)
Which may be the cause?
When installing LimeSuiteNG, it logs where the files are being placed, for example:
“Installing: /usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/gnuradio/limesuiteng/init.py”
Check if your system does not have multiple python versions installed, and if the limesuiteng files were installed into the directories your python version expects.
You can list directories where python is looking for packages: “python3 -m site”
I suppose that the problem I have is related to the warning I receive during the make command. Below you can find the warning message. Any suggestion to fix it?
Regards and Happy New Year!
Piero
CMake Warning at /usr/lib/cmake/pybind11/pybind11Tools.cmake:177 (add_library):
Cannot generate a safe runtime search path for target limesuiteng_python
because files in some directories may conflict with libraries in implicit
directories:
runtime library [libgmpxx.so.4] in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu may be hidden by files in:
/home/piero/anaconda3/lib
runtime library [libgmp.so.10] in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu may be hidden by files in:
/home/piero/anaconda3/lib
Some of these libraries may not be found correctly.
Call Stack (most recent call first):
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cmake/gnuradio/GrPybind.cmake:287 (pybind11_add_module)
plugins/gr-limesuiteng/python/limesuiteng/bindings/CMakeLists.txt:37 (gr_pybind_make_oot)
From the directories path I assume you are using Linux.
Did you use conda on Linux to install GNURadio and LimeSuiteNG?
For Linux I suggest you install GNURadio using package manager or from source, and also install LimeSuiteNG from source. As it seems that conda environment libraries may be having conflicts with your system libraries, you could try removing the conda stuff.
From provided warning:
It looks like you are trying to build LimeSuiteNG and its components in conda environment on Linux platform and the current conda environment is missing gmp library. This also gives clue to the previous python import error that you encountered:
It is very possible that the python directory that was used by GNURadio was completely different from the python directory that was used to install the built limesuiteng python module. This directory mismatch was likely caused because of active conda environment. For now it would be best to avoid building LimeSuiteNG in conda environment. To deactivate conda environment, first check if your terminal prompt starts with the following text in parentheses:
(base) ~/> _
or
(other_names) ~/> _
If you see text before terminal prompt, this means that conda environment is active. Conda environment can be disabled by invoking conda deactivate. Use this command until terminal prompt has no text before it like so ~/> _. Once the environment is deactivated, delete the already present build directories for LimeSuiteNG library and plugin and re-run the steps again as mentioned in the library and plugin build steps.
Hi Arnius and Richards,
Thanks to your indications I was able to have LimeSuiteNG working perfectly. Problems were due to several mistakes I made when I firstly tried to install GNURadio in Conda environment. After that I uninstalled GRC from Conda and I made an GRC installation directly in Ubuntu. But probably I left something in Conda that caused the errors during make phase.
Now I completely removed Conda and then I repeated the cmake and make for LimeSuitNG. Now everything works correctly.
Thank you again. I wish you a 2026 full of GNURadio!!!