You can only cheerlead for so long until you realize you’re cheering as a means to inspire, but no one is listening to that message…
Thanks,
Marty
Marty:
I have been guilty of waiting to get a round tuit when it comes to such software. I would love to contribute to the software development. But I am such a procrastinator – I haven’t even applied DC power to my LimeSDR yet! I have been collecting all the parts to put it in a case “my way”, which involves soldering pin headers in the LED sockets on the board, soldering 4 bicolor LEDs to a piece of perfboard, making four -wire jumpers, drilling 4 holes in the Luftek front panel for the LEDs, drilling 4 holes in the bottom of the case for 4 aluminum 2-56 threaded standoff, lining the case bottom with thermally conductive electrically insulated pad, mounting the front panel and LimeSDR, adding copper heat sinks to the big chips, drilling ventilation holes in the top of the case, drilling mounting holes through the case for an aluminum heat sink and a pair of fans, adding all the u.Fl to chassis RF cables, etc., etc. My other stumbling block is getting Linux running on my laptop and desktop in manner that coexists with Windows 10. Maybe if I skip Linux it would motivate me more to get a transceiver running on Windows. At least I can’t blame the dog for eating the program listings, she went to doggie heaven last month.
I don’t know if the crowdfunding approach will work, but we’ll never know unless we try. Sadly, Simon has made himself ineligible to participate since he insists on a closed source approach, which of course is his right. Maybe his hard work will at least inspire a programmer on how the receive half should work.
I’ve also been contemplating how to turn the LimeSDR into a 10-band VHF through microwave radio suitable for roving or a home station (50 MHz through 10.5GHz).
Good luck enticing a competent programmer to do the project.
John P. Toscano, W0JT/5, EL09vu20
1 Like
I’m new to this forum, and too late for the arbitrary date that was placed, but I’ve got to say, this thread seems to be the complete opposite of how crowdfunding should work.
If money is the motivating factor for someone looking to write this software, it would be much better for everyone if they set up their own crowdfunding campaign. They’ll know how much they’ll need to cover their living costs etc far better than you. They won’t run the risk of putting months into it with no guarantee of payment (in the unlikely case of multiple people rising to this challenge). There’s an unnecessary step in the middle (you), who’s taking payment for something that doesn’t even exist on the promise of paying it to someone you deem worthy. Have you even considered the lax liabilities you could be opening yourself up to? The success criteria is also vague and subjective.
More significantly, should you even be rewarding the FIRST such project anyway? What if someone submits something that does everything you requested, but the UI feels clunky and unpleasant to use. A month or 2 later, imagine something better comes along that’s a joy to use, but you’ve already given away your crowdfunding money for something that now nobody even wants to use.
Consider the Raspberry Pi Quake 3 bounty. All the money came from corporate sponsorship and was a significant amount ($10000) to try to encourage people to create an open-source GL for the RPi. And yet 3 years after the winner was announced, there’s still a long way to go despite lots of work by countless other people and the whole bounty seems like it was a bit of a sideshow.
But in any case, even with your 15 people so far that’s only $380 up for grabs. That’s a nice perk if you happened to be already writing such a thing (in which case you don’t need the incentive), but no way near enough to even consider as compensation for the work required.
I guess what I’m saying boils down to:
- As a potential customer, I’d much rather fund someone who’s actually doing the work.
- As a potential developer, even though I’m perfectly capable of making the exact thing you want, there’s nothing in this campaign that’d entice me to put my projects aside to work on it.
2 Likes
There is no arbitrary date anymore because there is no challenge…I’ve withdrawn the entire thing and not asking ANYONE to do ANYTHING, ANYMORE. Thanks for reenforcing the on-going opinion that it’s going to take millions of dollars to entice anyone to make the Lime transmit because “…we have better things to do…”.
Whatever happened to genuine interest in a project to make it succeed?
Marty
1 Like
I am the author/maintainer of SoDaRadio. A port that supports LimeSDR is well underway.
A friend lent me his LimeSDR to get things started. I’ve got the receiver working, but the CW transmitter isn’t quite there yet. I suspect I’m not understanding the scheme behind calls to writeStream. I’ve gotten the radio to send my call and other stuff, but the transmit stream times out after one or two cycles through activateStream, writeStream, deactivateStream. (I deactivate the TX stream when we go into RX mode.) I’ve also sent a USB signal across the desk from the LimeSDR to my USRP. However, there were very very long delays, again pointing to something I’ve done wrong with the TX streamer.
The code is a “work in progress” with lots of clip leads still in it. It’s available here on SourceForge The Lime branch is LimePort2.
I’ve done the port using the SoapySDR library as it is pretty close in spirit to libuhd. I know there are various other ways to bridge the gap, but this looked like it would be the one with the fewest moving parts and levels of translation.
4 Likes
@marty and company
Rest assured that there are still folks out there doing it for the joy of it. I am.
I wrote SoDaRadio because I wanted to learn more about SDR and I needed a good IF radio for my 10GHz microwave system. It has been a “work in progress” for about 5 years now, but it has worked well as an IF, and others have used it to build a satellite ground station. My current configuration is an Ettus N200 USRP with a UBX module that covers 10MHz to 6 GHz.
SoDaRadio is about 16K lines of C++ for the radio part, and about 5K lines for the GUI. It isn’t bullet-proof, and it isn’t industrial quality. It is pretty good.
Attached are two screenshots of SoDaRadio working with a LimeSDR. They were taken last night. The first shows a waterfall display from the local NWS station at 162.4 MHz. The second is a peridogram showing a signal from a very well isolated and accurate signal generator. The signal at the radio’s input was -148 dBm. The bucket size for the FFT was about 38Hz.
8 Likes
Matthew - I read your post last night late and was greatly encouraged once again that the Lime might actually be functional for Hams to use. I’ve actually seen your application several weeks ago and wondered if it might be a candidate for the Lime. Let me assure you that this is nothing short of great news for A LOT OF US that have been waiting a long time for something more than receive on the LimeSDR. The fact that this is open source is even better - it gives others a chance to see how you’ve put this together and give their input on the first truly open source transceiver application for the Lime.
I’m not kidding - your message here last night revived my sagging hope that we’ll see the Lime transmitting and receiving on the Amateur frequencies not only in the HF band, but the V/U/SHF bands as well. I’m going to try your application in its current form and be an avid follower - - and possibly help - - bring this application to a swift conclusion so those Hams, like me and many others, will FINALLY have an app that can fully utilize the Lime’s capabilities.
One fellow who can answer A LOT of your questions is @joshblum. There is no one that understands the LimeSDR from a software perspective more than Josh. I encourage you to post your questions to him to gain a better understanding of the issues you’re facing with the Lime.
Again, Matt, THANK YOU for bringing in SoDaRadio to the Lime - - PLEASE keep up the great work and WELCOME ABOARD…!
73 de Marty, KN0CK
2 Likes
HIGHLY ENCOURAGING…! Please do keep working this and get with @joshblum if you have any questions, Matt.
73 de Marty, KN0CK
If you trying to install SoDaRadio follow this instruction from site his https://sourceforge.net/p/sodaradio/wiki/Building%20on%20Ubuntu%2014.04/
Might you less figuring out whats wrong when you compile yours and have couples of problem.
Yes, pleased make sure that @kb1vc has his own board. If everything else fails, he can have my v1.2 board, although shipping from Denmark would be a bitch.
Thanks guys, but I’d rather do this without reward or compensation. It keeps things simpler, and in the spirit that I started in. “Labors of love” can turn into “labors of obligation” once money or hardware changes hands.
My intent is to get this working at the level of function that is provided for the USRPs. As users of SoDa know, the code is available, and I make improvements from time to time, but not on a regular schedule. (Most of the heavy work is just before the 10GHz contest each year.) I do occasionally field feature requests, but this is a very very very part-time hobby, so the response is rarely instantaneous.
I’ve promised a friend to have the port done by June, and I’ll likely make that target, given a favoring tide and fair winds.
Again, thank you for the encouragement – it is very welcome – but, for a lot of reasons, I’d rather do this without compensation.
If you feel compelled to make a donation, rather than send it to me, pick a charity that you like. My son’s favorite is http://www.grassrootscrisis.org/ .
Now let’s see if I can fix a few problems with the CW transmitter and the USB timing. —
'73,
matt
8 Likes
Hey Matt,
Nice Progress!!
Working on matching networks here. S-parameters have been measured on a modified input and a simple design done in Ansoft Designer. Parts have arrived to build up a 1296 network. We’ll see how it goes.
Mike
1 Like
kb1vc, makes a lot of sense. One thing you could do at no cost and very little time would be to put the project on github. Forget about whether or not github/sourceforge is better than the other just consider that many largish/well known projects on sourceforge found they got many more contributions once they went to github.
I don’t think this would change the spirit of the project.
Hi, I am the main author/maintainer of SDRangel that supports LimeSDR for both Rx and Tx:
It also supports BladeRF and HackRF for Rx and Tx and some more Rx only devices including the famous RTL-SDR.
I am currently running it on the Rx side of my LimeSDR and I can say that the latest version appears to be stable. Honestly I have not tested the Tx part extensively. It is also supposed to support the concurrent running of both Rx and both Tx. I also had some trouble understanding how the LimeSuite library is supposed to work and stream management with concurrent Rx/Tx might not be quite properly supported although I have managed to run both Rx at the same time being careful in the sequence of operations.
I am very busy with the development along with my day job and had very little time for proper user documentation. However the readme in each folder of the plugins also linked in the wiki should help understanding how the different GUI are supposed to work. Each button or text area also has a mouse over tooltip.
This is an Open Source project and I do not claim any money for it. What I would appreciate the most are development or documenting contributions as there are still so many things to do. With the plugin approach the list can be infinite…
Edouard, F4EXB.
9 Likes
Hi Edouard,
Will it work on Ubuntu 17.04?
Larry in El Paso
I answered my own question:
The repository ‘http://ppa.launchpad.net/george-edison55/cmake-3.x/ubuntu zesty Release’ does not have a Release file.
Larry in El Paso
Hi Larry,
this PPA is used to get cmake v3 for old Ubuntu 14.04. In 16.04 it is already not needed anymore and I suppose it is the same for 17.04. Binaries (.deb) may or may not work however, I haven’t tested it.
Best regards,
Edouard.
1 Like