January 2020

The Free Stuff recipient for January was Gabriel Sheeley, who runs an electrical engineering/embedded software meetup in Columbus, Ohio. They do do everything from soldering workshops, to tearing apart smart TVs, to automating chicken coops to keep out raccoons. Gabriel asked for a YARD Stick One to use in a talk about RF hacking, and now that the meetup is remote, the group will have to take turns with their new gadget.

February 2020

We sent a HackRF One to the CU Boulder Sounding Rocket Lab Avionics Team for their ground station. They told us that they are “building an 18-foot-tall rocket from scratch (all student-built) that will leave this humble planet for a brief period of time, before drifting gracefully back to earth and our eagerly waiting hands. We intend to shatter the records for collegiate and amateur rocketry at our upcoming launch later this year. Our most up-to-date simulations project a maximum altitude of 190km and speeds topping out at Mach 7. During the entire flight we aim to maintain contact with the vehicle so we can continuously monitor its physical (and emotional) state.”

We are looking forward to attending the launch, hopefully in 2021.

March 2020

In March, Luis Salha asked us for a YARD Stick One to use for RF encryption research for his current Swiss army knife project BlackBox. He says he’s been experimenting with RF capture, analysis, replay, and brute force attacks, and he hopes to learn more about key rolling/hopping and cracking keeloq encryption using readily available hardware.