In December, we sent a HackRF One to Jærgruppen av NRRL Norsk Radio Relae Liga, an amateur radio group in southwest Norway. They run radio courses every year and work with their local scouting groups. They hope to use their new HackRF in this year’s JOTA (Jamboree on the Air).
It’s happenning! We started shipping GreatFET One to resellers last week, which means that very soon (probably even today) it will be available for you to order online from your favorite reseller of Great Scott Gadgets products. Hint: if your shop of choice doesn’t carry it yet, let them know you’re interested!
It was January of 2016 when Mike Ossmann gave his firetalk at Shmoocon titled GreatFET: A Preview, in which he explained how he bought the GoodFET project from Travis Goodspeed in a Las Vegas bar for $5. That was the beginning of the project that came to be known (humorously, at first) as GreatFET. At that time, GreatFET One was known as Azalea, and was still in the development stage. Three years and countless hours of engineering, development, and manufacturing effort later, we have completed the first production run.
GreatFET One is a general purpose (and like all of our tools, open source) USB peripheral. When we say it’s general purpose, we mean that there are a whole lot of interesting things a hardware hacker, or maker, or tinkerer can customize it to do, especially through the addition of add-on boards called neighbors. But you don’t need to add anything on to start using this versatile this tool; there is plenty of USB hackery to be accomplished with GreatFET One on its own. Check out what Kate Temkin has been up to over the last year or so!
Very soon, we will also start offering a clear acrylic case and Daffodil, a solderless breadboard neighbour. To learn more about the GreatFET project and to see which resellers are already stocking GreatFET One, visit the GreatFET One product page.
Just over ten years ago I sent my first email to Dominic Spill:
“We haven’t met, Dominic, but I hope you don’t mind being included on this message. I thought you two might be interested in some work I finally got around to writing up. . .”
I had been exploring the use of software-defined radio for Bluetooth monitoring and had found Dominic’s paper on the subject. He and I quickly began collaborating on the development of tools and techniques that improved upon the methods in his paper. Just three months later, we presented Building an All-Channel Bluetooth Monitor at ShmooCon 2009.
We met in person for the first time the day before our talk at ShmooCon, and we have been friends and research partners ever since.
Over the next two years I learned electronics and designed Ubertooth One, a low cost test tool that implemented some of the techniques Dominic and I had developed. Ultimately this me led to create Great Scott Gadgets as a way to put such tools into the hands of innovative people around the world.
When Great Scott Gadgets began to become too much work for me alone, Dominic was the first person I turned to for help. He took over development and support for the Ubertooth project as a remote contractor while I turned my attention to developing new tools and growing the company.
Eventually Dominic moved to the United States and joined the GSG team in Colorado as a full-time employee. He played a key role in research and development, provided technical support for our resellers and end users, led our software development efforts, mentored interns, kept our internal IT systems up and running, and even cleaned the refrigerator. His humor, creativity, and patience have been felt by every member of the team.
For ten years Dominic and I have continued collaborating on research and developing new tools. I’ve lost count of the number of conference presentations we’ve given together and of how many times one of us has turned to the other and said, “Here’s a crazy idea. . .”
Yesterday was Dominic’s last day at Great Scott Gadgets. Having decided that he needed a change, he will pursue new adventures.
We will miss Dominic greatly. He will always be a part of the GSG family.
The Free Stuff recipient for October is the Wave Farm. Wave Farm is a non-profit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves. Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. The Wave Farm Artist Residency Program is located on 29 bucolic acres in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley and supports new transmission art work by visiting artists from around the globe. Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM is a full-power non-commercial FM radio station committed to radio as a platform for community engagement and artistic experimentation. They do some really interesting stuff - their pond has its own station! Check them out! wavefarm.org
Bridgewire Makerspace in Sparks, Nevada asked for a HackRF One to use in the Hamshack/wireless research station they are putting together in their electronics shop. Their space is open around the clock for members to create, learn and share. They are a member-funded and -run 501c3 organization that provides a space for working on projects and sharing ideas and knowledge. Check out their website here: bridgewire.org
If you’d like to submit your project idea for consideration to receive free hardware from Great Scott Gadgets, please visit the Free Stuff page and send us a message!
Matthias Carneiro is a PhD student in Montpellier, France. He asked for a HackRF One to use in his research on SDR implementation in nanosatellite constellations. When he completes his PhD, he is going to donate the HackRF One to the university for the use of other students.
We decided to go big at Toorcamp this year and make a jar of crème brûlée for every single person that attended. Delicious? Yes. Too ambitious? Maybe. Open source? You got it.
Image via Patch Eudor
Harnessing the power of GreatFET, we were able to connect a temperature sensor, LCD screen, and some bucket heaters, and cook up a very large amount of crème brûlée inside an average sized cooler while at camp, and it worked… but there were some rough spots. The problem wasn’t necessarily in the cooking process, but in the preparation stage: the cooler was able to fit 120 4oz jars in it for a batch, so someone needs to be cracking 120 eggs and separating the yolks, someone needs to be washing/drying 120 jars and lids from the factory, someone needs to mix the egg yolks, cream, vanilla, and sugar into a huge jug, someone needs to pour the right amount of mix into 120 jars, and someone needs to tighten 120 jar lids to the correct tightness, all while 10 gallons of water heats up in a cooler. Once all this is done, the batch can be placed into the cooking cooler for about seventy-five minutes. Finally, jars can be pulled from the cooking cooler to be sugared and brûlée’d by a person with a blow torch one at a time. Repeat.
As you can imagine, this takes a considerable amount of time and effort for just one batch of 120 jars. Not only that, but there unsurprisingly was not a 100% success rate, as some lids were not tight enough before being cooked and jars were cracked during the blowtorch brûlée phase. Doing this back to back for a few days was a ton of work. We were able to make 695 crème brûlées in one weekend, and everyone that wanted one got at least one! But for anyone thinking about trying this, be prepared to get your hands dirty.
If you want to learn about the R&D process you can check out the talk we gave at Toorcamp or if you’re interested in the source code and set-up, check it out on GitHub.
In September I made the following public comment on the Office of United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) Proposed Modification of Action Pursuant to Section 301: China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation.
Thank you for requesting comments on the proposed supplemental action in response to China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation (USTR-2018-0026).
As the founder and owner of Great Scott Gadgets, a Colorado small business that puts open source tools into the hands of innovative people, I urge you to refrain entirely from imposing any new duty increases. Additionally I urge you to eliminate all recent increases made as a part of this action.
Due to the inclusion of multiple tariff subheadings in the proposal, I anticipate that Great Scott Gadgets will suffer a significant increase in the cost of products we sell. Ultimately the technological innovators who are the end users of our products will bear this increase. Instead of punishing China, the increased duties will harm American innovators who rely on tools such as ours. Innovators in China and elsewhere around the world will gain an advantage over Americans as a result of the action.
Great Scott Gadgets designs and manufactures open source hardware (OSHW). The OSHW community includes a rapidly growing group of companies committed to the ideals that end users have a right to fully control their own equipment and that anyone should be able to study, make, use, modify, and sell devices based on our published designs. OSHW makers recognize that, just as open source software has resulted in great advances in the software industry, open source hardware will enable future generations of hardware innovation.
The growth of Great Scott Gadgets and other open source hardware and software companies demonstrates that protection of intellectual property is unnecessary for commercial success in technological markets. This undermines the USTR’s argument that “China’s acts, policies, and practices that effectuate technology transfer burden and restrict U.S. commerce.”
I maintain that open source technology greatly enhances innovation and that the best way to foster rapid development of new technology is to encourage both the free exchange of ideas and free trade of tools, materials, and all goods.
In my opinion, the proposed supplemental action will have little effect on China’s acts, policies, or practices but will disproportionately harm Great Scott Gadgets, our employees, our American resellers, and the American innovators who depend on our tools.
El destinario de Cosas Gratis para junio es Gabriel Martín Miguel de Salamanca, España. Él quiere hacer una plataforma de radio asequible a los nuevos radioaficionados para acercarles las nuevas formas de hacer radio. Él tiene un grupo de Facebook sobre SDR para usuarios, programadores y radioficionados en español, tanto en España como en latinoamerica, aqui: facebook.com/groups
CTRL-H Hackerspace of Portland, Oregon asked us for a HackRF One. They plan to use it for SDR workshops and their Electronics Lab Radio Closet, where they'll be capturing and hosting as much data as possible through SDR. It looks like they have made some fabulous spaces for creating, learning and hanging — check them out here: pdxhs.org
If you'd like to submit your project idea for consideration to receive free hardware from Great Scott Gadgets, please visit the Free Stuff page and send us a message!
We sent Oleksandr Tytko a HackRF One. He is studying at Lyceum No 1, Chernivtsi, Ukraine. He and his classmates plan to use the HackRF One to learn about SDR and to write and test their own code. He is also very enthusiastic about starting an open source project studying the influence of radio frequencies on plants and people. He sent us a picture of the greenhouse in his local Botanic Garden where he plans to do the research:
Dan Groeneveld is an instructor at Northland Pioneer College in Show Low, Arizona. He is going to be teaching net security and pentesting courses this autumn, so we sent him some Throwing Star LAN Tap Kits. He is looking forward to teaching his students LAN Tap principles and soldering basics. We can't wait to see pictures of them in their lab.
If you'd like to submit your project idea for consideration to receive free hardware from Great Scott Gadgets, please visit the Free Stuff page and send us a message!
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