Conference, DSP, Electronics, RF, SDR

Tayloe Mixer Frontend for the Supercon 2023 Vector Scope Badge

The Hackaday Supercon conference is an amazing convergence of electronics, makers, engineers, designers, educators, and anyone else interested in making cool projects. Each year we descend on the town of Old Pasadena to Hack on things over the weekend in early November. The amazing thing about the conference is that every year they build a… Continue reading Tayloe Mixer Frontend for the Supercon 2023 Vector Scope Badge

Electronics, RF

Setting up the Hak5 Wifi Coconut

The Wi-Fi Coconut is a device produced by Hak5 with the express purpose of capturing all 14 Wi-Fi channels. https://shop.hak5.org/products/wifi-coconut It does this by having a dedicated Wi-Fi chip for each channel ganging all of them up via USB to a host computer. This can take quite a bit of power so there is an… Continue reading Setting up the Hak5 Wifi Coconut

Docker, RF, SDR, Software

Creating a WiFi Monitor with a Kismet Docker Container

In my quest to become more familiar with Docker I decided to create a container to run another wireless radio software called Kismet. Kismet is a wireless network and device detector, sniffer, wardriving tool, and WIDS (wireless intrusion detection) framework. Kismet works with Wi-Fi interfaces, Bluetooth interfaces, some SDR (software defined radio) hardware like the… Continue reading Creating a WiFi Monitor with a Kismet Docker Container

RF, Software

First Look at CENOS Antenna Design Software

Hobbyist and low-cost antenna design software have been usually limited to basic theoretical calculations based on ideal EM equations that could be done on the back of the hand. It is only recently that full EM simulation has drifted down to the masses in a semi-affordable way. CENOS Antenna Design software is one of the… Continue reading First Look at CENOS Antenna Design Software

Electronics, RF

Measuring the Range of nRF24L01 Modules with CircuitPython

I became really interested in the capabilities of the nRF24L01 radio modules due to their insanely low price ~$2 in quantity, compared to something like a LoRa module ~$25. So you can basically have 10 for the price of one. Now I am not saying these are comparable devices, since the LoRa devices can be… Continue reading Measuring the Range of nRF24L01 Modules with CircuitPython

RF, Software

Simulating Helium with HotspotRF

With any successful wireless system, you want to have some theoretical basis that your transmitted information can reach its intended receiver with enough power to be deciphered correctly. This is the basic idea behind a link budget where you compile information about your radio hardware and setup such as transmitter power, receiver sensitivity, antenna gain,… Continue reading Simulating Helium with HotspotRF