bladeRF

bladeRF is a family of software-defined radio (SDR) hardware platforms and accompanying software developed by Nuand. Designed to be affordable and open, bladeRF targets researchers, educators, and hobbyists who need a flexible RF front end with accessible control software for experimentation, prototyping, and teaching.

Hardware features include a USB 3.0 interface (with newer revisions also supporting other host connections), an FPGA-based control core, high-speed ADCs and DACs, and a software-configurable RF front end with multiple ports for transmit and receive. The design supports full-duplex operation and broad tunability across a wide portion of the RF spectrum. Instantaneous bandwidth is in the tens of megahertz, making bladeRF suitable for a variety of wireless, radar, and spectrum-monitoring experiments. The boards provide form factors and connectors aimed at developers and lab environments, with documented pinouts and programming interfaces.

Software and ecosystem are a central focus for bladeRF. The project provides libbladeRF, a C API and toolkit for device control, along with the bladeRF-cli command-line tool. bladeRF hardware is designed to work with common SDR software stacks, including GNU Radio, SoapySDR, and other open-source projects, enabling use with popular flowgraphs and tools for signal generation, capture, and analysis. The software emphasizes openness, with documentation, firmware, and drivers maintained in public repositories.

Variants and development history include the original bladeRF 1.x series and newer bladeRF 2.x revisions, which offer improvements in performance and host interfacing. The open nature of the project has driven community contributions, tutorials, and educational applications, reinforcing bladeRF’s role in SDR research and learning.

See also: HackRF, USRP, LimeSDR, RTL-SDR.