The belated November 2024 recipients for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program are the folks at iMagineLab makerspace in Antwerp, Belgium! iMagineLab is home to a community of students and tech enthusiasts alike that gather weekly to collaborate on and share knowledge for open source projects.

Thomas Janssen from iMagineLab has informed us of the makerspace’s upcoming project to build a digital radio receiver for receiving and decoding NOAA weather signals using open source software. Their goal is to then visualize NOAA weather images and collect and display data to create a weather monitoring station based on RF signals!

Thomas has also mentioned that iMagineLab hosts and participates in workshops and hackathons, covering a variety of topics such as software-defined radio (SDR), IoT, and embedded systems. He says that the availability of HackRF devices would significantly enhance their group’s ability to offer hands-on learning experiences in these areas. Additionally, having HackRF devices at the makerspace will allow members to conduct practical experiments and contribute to open source SDR projects, such as GNU Radio.

This application for the Free Stuff program stood out to the team here at Great Scott Gadgets because of its focus on community impact and education. The HackRF One will not only be used to develop a weather monitoring station, but find life after the project’s completion and be used in upcoming educational curriculum and open source contributions. We are excited to see what the iMagineLab team accomplishes with their new HackRF One!