The Lime Suite NG GUI has improved support for more complex SDR board designs.

Lime Suite is a collection of software that is used with the LimeSDR family of boards and its history can be traced back close to a decade. The software was originally developed as a GUI to complement Lime’s family of evaluation boards, and then further developed into a driver plus GUI for use with the combination of the STREAM FPGA and LMS7002M dev and eval boards, which together served as a prototyping platform for the first LimeSDR (USB) launched back in 2016.

The Lime Suite codebase has grown over the years to incorporate many improvements and become the foundation for various SDR boards and modules that utilise Lime chipsets. The software collection has also grown to include numerous examples, utilities — such as for testing and programming firmware/gateware — and plug-ins for applications such as the SoapySDR framework and GNU Octave.

After many years of development it became clear that Lime Suite would benefit from certain architectural changes, such as improved support for boards with more than one transceiver. Furthermore, these improvements would result in breaking API changes, hence it was decided to implement them via a new project, Lime Suite NG (Next Generation).

Lime Suite vs. Lime Suite NG

The original Lime Suite project is now transitioning to maintenance mode, where it will continue to receive critical fixes, new issues and pull requests are still welcomed, and new releases will be made as and when appropriate. However, all architectural improvements, new features and support for new SDR boards will be implemented via Lime Suite NG.

Given the breaking API changes and a desire to ease transition from Lime Suite to Lime Suite NG, the latter has been developed such that it can coexist alongside the former; both Lime Suite variants may be installed at the same time and applications may make use of either one or both.

In addition, Lime Suite NG has a compatibility wrapper, which provides the legacy LMS API and allows applications to be used with the new version largely unmodified. However, it is recommended that applications eventually migrate to using the new SDRDevice API.

Other changes include development of the gr-limesdr source sink blocks for GNU Radio as part of the LimeSDR NG project. Similarly, the Amarisoft cellular network stack RF driver module is also developed as an optional component of Lime Suite NG.

Documentation

Documentation is available for Lime Suite NG and this is very much still a work-in-progress and at present this includes:

  • Building from source
  • CLI and GUI tools
  • Plug-ins
  • Basic API docs

This will be expanded upon over time.

Supported devices

At the time of writing Lime Suite NG supports the following board products:

  • LimeSDR USB
  • LimeSDR Mini v1
  • LimeSDR Mini v2
  • LimeSDR XTRX

Support for the LimeRFE board is also planned, but for the time being this must be used with classic Lime Suite, which as noted above can be installed on the same system and coexist with Lime Suite NG, with applications linking against either or both.

Lime Suite NG is still in heavy development and the initial priority has been to focus on support for LimeSDR XTRX — since this is not supported by the classic version of Lime Suite — along with the multi-transceiver boards which are used in the turnkey base station LimeNET family of products. Therefore owners of LimeSDR USB and LimeSDR Mini boards may for the time being wish to proceed with a little more caution. As ever, support questions should be posted to the MyriadRF forums and issue reports are welcomed.