On 24th March we hosted a one day workshop in partnership with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and Open Source Hardware User Group, that provided an introduction to software-defined radio and LimeSDR. Held at the BCS offices in central London, the event was free to attend and proved to be very popular, with participants ranging from industry experts to wireless novices.
The workshop was led by Principal RF Design Engineer at Lime Microsystems, Dr Danny Webster, who put together an excellent series of presentations supported by hands-on demonstrations.
Slide from presentation, What is LimeSDR?
The day started out by taking a look at the fundamental principles of wireless communication and digital radio, before exploring the LimeSDR platform and LMS7002M internals. Next the radio link was covered and key factors that contribute to its performance, followed by a look at methods of advanced digital radio communication and performance. Finally, LimeSDR boards were distributed and demos were run using Lime Suite, GNU Octave and Pothos.
Running a Pothos demo
The seven presentations and fifteen demos have all been published to GitHub. Hopefully these materials will prove to be of use to others starting out with LimeSDR, and we do plan to add to and improve these over time, with a view to them being used to support future workshops.
Despite the workshop going remarkably smoothly considering the various software that needed to be installed, packaging is one area where we intend to invest further effort, so as to make installing the requisite software across different O/S platforms even easier.
The talks were recorded, but the quality didn’t turn out as well as hoped and so we plan to re-record these at some point over the coming months.
Andrew