Nuand Research Blog

It’s been a busy week, we were going to announce this earlier but it took a while to negotiate with our distributors. The bladeRFs will now ship with RF shields! The shields will have removable tin caps to offer the most flexible shields possible because after all, this is a development kit. There are still a few other upgrades that we’re looking into at the moment.

The FSK example has been uploaded to Github, https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF . We’re still working on getting the rest of the source code ready for release but from now on new branches and functionality will be added directly to our Github.

Due to the outpouring of support we saw last week we thought it would be fitting to get a head start on finalizing our mass production plans, so we headed to the PCB manufacturing facility! Ensuring that our design files and test procedure are well understood by the manufacturer are very important for building a quality a product. As an additional measure, we have started securing many of what we considered to be medium and high risk components for our pre-production and production runs.

Lastly, we’re still accepting your feature requests for the bladeRF. Some of the definite design changes we will incorporate thus far include:

• Adding more GPIO pins, including bring out many LVDS pairs underneath the board
• Adding more LEDs
• Adding additional routing options for the SMB port
• Improving the clocking architecture by allowing the bladeRF’s clock to be GPS-disciplined

There are several other upgrades in the works that will be announced shortly as well

Thank you everyone for the tremendous amount of support you have shown for the bladeRF! It has been amazing to see our initial goal being reached in less than 8 days. Along the way we have been featured by Hackaday, Slashdot, and mentioned by some very inspiring people via Twitter! We were taken by surprise by the enthusiasm we have seen from the community, so to keep things interesting we will be announcing several stretch goals very soon!

Having reached our initial goal so quickly, we can get a head start on the pre-production run of the bladeRF. This extra time will give us much more time to consider and integrate backer requested features, so please don’t hesitate to use the comments page!

Thanks again everyone!