If you will be attending DEFCON this weekend, come to our talk at 8/3/13 – 17:30 in the Wireless Village or swing by our booth in the vendor area!

Here is a teaser of the last thing we were briefly able to work on before heading out to DEFCON (yes, it is the first ever SDR-UAV! )

It doesn’t yet fly, but it will. The headless mode code will be released shortly. Anyone with expertise or anyone who is interested in modern and/or robust controls please contact [email protected]

The bladeRF is being powered through the GPIO board by the brushless DC BEC (battery elimination circuit).

We received a sizable shipment of nearly 200 bladeRFs on Thursday, we’re calibrating them over the weekend. This also means that we now have enough units to fill every order! Most orders that will be filled next week are going to international backers, which take a considerable amount of time to prepare correctly. Things should move more smoothly and quickly now that we are working with order fulfillment specialists to send bladeRFs internationally.

Also, all of the GPIO boards were manufactured and delivered to us this week. The boards have all been tested and are also ready to be mailed to be mailed out as well. If you ordered a bladeRF and a GPIO expansion board, and have only received the bladeRF until now, we will now mail your GPIO expansion board.

Here’s a close up of the GPIO board with the very bright tri-color LED turned off.

We shipped nearly 230 boards this past week! Surprisingly, the most time intensive part of the whole order fulfillment process, besides testing and calibrating each unit is actually boxing and shipping the units. We have received additional help so when we get the next batch of 100 units we will ship them all out within a day or two instead of taking a whole week.

If you are curios to experiment with the build environments, our Github (https://github.com/nuand/bladeRF ) now has tutorials and instructions for building all of the software and HDL parts of bladeRF. (Picture guides are coming soon!)

The Linux driver is nearly complete and stable; several important concurrency patches will be committed by the end of the weekend that will address issues some of you may have experienced. Also, we are now planning on including additional Linux support by using libusb, this will also allow us to quickly port the code to Windows and OSX. The Linux driver will still continue to exist as our default Linux support because of the incredibly low SDR latencies we can achieve with it and the bladeRF. Preliminary testing has shown that we can easily go below 10us!

Lastly, here is a picture of the last 70 units before they were shipped.