Hardware Bladerf

bladerf

Nuand bladeRF — full-duplex transmit-capable SDR with an on-board FPGA

Vendor: Nuand

Status: supported — the identifiers and setup recipe are believed correct.

Not maintainer-verified: nobody on this project has run this hardware yet. The two facts are recorded separately on purpose (D-027) — a correct recipe and a tested device are different claims.

What it is

A full-duplex software defined radio with an on-board FPGA, able to transmit and receive at once — which most of the cheaper devices cannot.

What you can do with it

Anything needing simultaneous transmit and receive, and FPGA work for processing that has to happen before the data reaches the host.

Setup

Install the packages, add yourself to plugdev, and load a matching FPGA image with bladeRF-cli. The image is not shipped with the library and must be fetched separately.

Known problems

Three USB identifiers across generations, so a rule written for one board silently does not match another. Host library, firmware and FPGA image are version-coupled.

How it identifies itself

USB id	What	Confirmed	Node
2cf0:5250	bladeRF 2.0 micro	yes	libusb
2cf0:5246	bladeRF x40 / x115	yes	libusb
1d50:6066	bladeRF, OpenMoko-allocated identifier used by earlier firmware	yes	libusb

Access and permissions

Group membership required: plugdev — added at install, applies at next login.

The generated udev rule provides a /dev/bladerf symlink, mode 0660, group plugdev.

Firmware modes

• vendor_tool — tooling: libbladerf2 bladeRF-cli loads FPGA images and updates firmware. The FPGA bitstream is a separate download from the firmware and both are version-matched to the host library; a mismatch reports as an obscure initialisation failure.

Software that makes it useful

gqrx-sdr, libbladerf2, soapysdr-module-bladerf

Upstream: https://www.nuand.com/