CaribouLite - 6GHz SDR HAT for Raspberry Pi

CaribouLite is an SDR (Software Defined Radio) product answering the following questions: How do you make a Software Defined Radio which is portable, capable, and affordable. The motivation came from the current communication systems in UAVs and UGVs in which a self-contained communication system is a must, and it needs to be lightweight and support multiple protocols.

We came up with an answer - take the most popular Brain (the raspberry pi) that every engineer is familiar with, and expand it with the widest possible radio transceiver.

CaribouLite is capable of transmitting and receiving in two parallel channels - (1) a wide 30-6000 MHz channel, and (2) a sub-1GHz channel. The immediate bandwidth (2.5MHz with 4 MSPS ADC and DAC) is sufficient for most IoT communication.

The SDR is fully integrated inside the #RaspberryPi Linux software and OS. So it supports the standard communication modulations (such as PSK, FSP, OFDM, etc.) and it also supports direct I/Q sampling and (13-bit x2 - ADC and DAC) directly from the RPI. The CaribouLite is streaming these data chunks over the SMI interface (Broadcom's Secondary Memory Interface) which provides sufficient digital bandwidth for the task.

Software front-ends such as SoapySDR and GNU Radio are supported and additional usage examples shall be available soon.

In our GitHub Repository, the more technical full open-source can be found.

Though this project is currently in the work process, we have released our second revision (final) board for production. It is providing more educational and research-oriented features to the product, making it easier to start working with.

The product is backed by Crowd Supply and is currently in its pre-launch process.