The name “Soapy” in SoapySDR (and the associated Soapy drivers) comes from the idea of making SDR hardware support clean and simple — as in “soap makes things clean.”
SoapySDR was designed as a clean, hardware-agnostic abstraction layer for Software Defined Radio devices. Before it existed, SDR applications often needed device-specific drivers. SoapySDR “cleans up” that fragmentation by providing:
- A common API
- Hardware-independent interface
- Modular driver plug-ins (e.g., SoapyRTLSDR, SoapySDRPlay, SoapyAirspy)
The name was chosen to convey:
- 🧼 Clean interface
- 🧩 Modular plug-in design
- 🔄 Interoperability between SDR applications and hardware
It was created by Josh Blum, also known for Pothos, and SoapySDR fits into that ecosystem.
So in short:
Soapy = clean abstraction layer for SDR drivers.