pothosware/SoapySDR

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1495 stars · 226 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

SoapySDR is a vendor and platform neutral C++ support library providing a generalized API and runtime for interfacing with software-defined radio (SDR) devices. It uses a plugin architecture so drivers for most off-the-shelf SDR hardware can be loaded by applications like GNU Radio, Pothos, and command-line tools.

Use cases

• stream IQ samples from an RTL-SDR or HackRF in my own C++ or Python program
• use my SDR hardware with GNU Radio through a common API
• list and configure SDR devices attached to the system from the command line
• write a driver plugin for a custom SDR device
• access an SDR device remotely over the network
• replace vendor-specific SDKs with one unified SDR interface

When to choose

• you need a single vendor-neutral API to work with many SDR hardware types
• you are building an SDR application and want hardware integration without per-vendor SDKs
• you use GNU Radio, Pothos, or Python and need SDR device bindings

When to avoid

• you need a general-purpose hardware abstraction layer beyond SDR devices
• your hardware has a dedicated SDK you prefer to use directly
• you need a GUI application rather than a library/runtime

Facets

library · maturity stable

sdk plugin-system developer-tools hardware embedded-systems developer-tools cross-platform windows cross-platform python cpp sdr software-defined-radio hardware-abstraction rtlsdr gnuradio pothos radio dsp linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="pothosware/SoapySDR")