hackinSTACK

This is awesome!!!

The company, named Opal Kelly (www.opalkelly.com) has FPGA development boards for $199. This in and of itself is cool, but they have also offered an API in Python (yeah!!!) and several other languages to communicate with the Xilinx chips over USB 2.0. The cores are still written in Verilog, etc… which scares me just a tad, but everything else is within the reach of my still meager development abilities.

I so want one…

For a long time I’ve been mildly obsessed with any electronic projects involving FPGA’s. Ever since I saw a presentation at Blackhat 2006 on WEP cracking I’ve thought they were just the coolest thing since sliced bread.

I have also long been a fan of any radio-hacking type projects - from shortwave, to scanners, to RFID - but my frustration has always been that *each* project involved building separate devices to use for whatever signal it was that I was interested in. Not so more with this project. The group is HPSDR or High-sPeed Software Defined Radio if you like really long names. I’ve looked through all the schematics and joined the mailing list. It seems like a good group so far.

My first goal (which is a bit Rube Golberg’ish, I know) is to use their plans to build myself a shortwave receiver…

I’m hoping to use the work of the following page…

http://www.memeteam.net/2007/s2midi/

In order to integrate C# apps into my Arduino Decimilia platform. (primarily to give me a good client application to use with my magstripe skimmer I built) The project on that page is designed more for MIDI applications, but the codebase should be a good start for my needs.

I have been very impressed lately with Google’s integration of just about everything in the digital world. From photo’s to blogs to email I’ve converted a lot of the services I normally use over to them. I’m a little wary of how long they can sustain the quality they have right now, but only time will tell with that.

Check out everything else I’m using here…

• Photos
• Mail, News, Calendaring, etc…
• RSS Feeds
  
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets