GNURadio is the swiss-army-knife of software-defined radio suites: it does everything and anything. It has a great GUI overlayer that makes creating radio flows fairly simple. There are only two areas where we could quibble with the whole system — it’s a gigantic suite of software, and it’s a lot harder to code up in Python than it is to use the GUI.
[Vanya Sergeev] started up his LuaRadio project to deal with these shortcomings. If you’re looking for the full-GUI experience, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. LuaRadio is aimed at keeping things easy to code and keeping the codebase small and tidy.
That doesn’t mean that it departs entirely from GNURadio’s very successful flow-graph programming paradigm, however, and if you’re comfortable with the procedure of hooking up a signal source to a filter block to an output, you’ll be doing fine here as well. Check out the obligatory FM radio demo — the “hello world” of SDR — and you’ll see how it works: instantiate the various blocks in code, and then issue “connect” commands to link them together.
LuaRadio’s main selling points are its size and the ease of programming it by hand. It’s got great documentation to boot. It’s written as a library that’s embeddable in your C code, so that you can write standalone programs that make use of its functionality.
LuaRadio is a new project and it doesn’t have a GUI either. It may not be the ideal introduction to SDR if you’re afraid of typing. (If you are new to SDR, start here.) But if you want to code up your SDR by coding, or run your radio on smaller devices, it’s probably worth a look. It’s at v0.1.1, so we’re looking forward to hearing more from LuaRadio in the future. Any of you out there use it? We’d love to hear in the comments.
“it’s a lot harder to code up in Python than it is to use the GUI.”
Err, how is that? Just create the block and connect it … Python business as usual …
its BS
luaradio is gnuradio with no ui and python replaced by lua, because hipsters use lua nowadays? (personally I would expect elixir or go)
It’s at least lightweight compared to gnuradio, if you’re into that.
gnuradio is a monster to compile. It is my impression that this is much smaller, has way fewer dependencies and therefore (hopefully) a much greater likelihood of success. Not to mention less likely to break on upgrades of related code. Also I would expect much easier to get running on embedded ARM hardware instead of a laptop or desktop Intel. But I have not rtried. Only had failures at gnuradio on an Ubuntu laptop though one of our guys has it all going with a HackRF-Blue.