The aim of this paper is to present an implementation of a functional IEEE 802.15.7 real-time testbed based on the Software Defined Radio (SDR) concept. This implementation is built with low cost Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) analog devices and the use of Universal Software Radio Peripheral version 2 (USRP2) equipment combined with a generic object-oriented framework that takes advantage of several open source software libraries. The prototype is validated in a controlled laboratory environment with an over-the-air measurement campaign.