Crème Brûlée Camp

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...

Comments on the Recent USTR Tariff Action

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...

Fernvale Kits - Lack of Interest - Discount

Back in December 2014 at 31C3, bunnie and xobs presented about their exciting Fernvale project, how they reverse engineered parts of the MT6260 ARM SoC, which also happens to contain a Mediatek GSM baseband.

Thousands (at least hundreds) of people have seen that talk live. To date, 2506 people (or AIs?) have watched the recordings on youtube, 4859 more people on media.ccc.de.

Given that Fernvale was the closest you could get to having a hackable baseband processor / phone chip, I expected at least as much interest into this project as we received four years earlier with OsmocomBB.

As a result, in early 2015, sysmocom decided to order 50...

ESP8266 Home Automation Projects - Errata

After the ESP8266 Home Automation Projects book was published, the wunderground.com service is not offering free services anymore, so the code presented in the Getting data from the internet part need to be reviewed.
There are two options in here: either you are subscribing to the wunderground.com service, paying a monthly subscription or you can choose other provider like OpenWeatherMap.org
Go to openweathermap.org an create an account. After login you will find your own API Key that will be used later in the code.
Now the code for getting current data is:
#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
#include <ESP8266HTTPClient.h>
const char* ssid = "YOUR_WIFI_SSID";
const char* password = "YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD";
const String OPENWEATHERMAP_API_KEY =...

Wireshark dissector for 3GPP CBSP - traces wanted!

I recently was reading 3GPP TS 48.049, the specification for the CBSP (Cell Broadcast Service Protocol), which is the protocol between the BSC (Base Station Controller) and the CBC (Cell Broadcast Centre). It is how the CBC according to spec is instructing the BSCs to broadcast the various cell broadcast messages to their respective geographic scope.

While OsmoBTS and OsmoBSC do have support for SMSCB on the CBCH, there is no real interface in OsmoBSC yet on how any external application would instruct it tot send cell broadcasts. The only existing interface is a VTY command, which is nice for testing and development, but hardly a scalable...

Seamonkey's gradual showdown

Finding and testing alternative web browsers and email clients to Seamonkey. An in-depth critique of Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.

IBM 5161 Expansion Chassis Extender and Receiver Cards

Today is an exciting day for people who collect vintage IBM PCs and XTs! IBM had a somewhat obscure add-on product called the 5161 expansion chassis, which looked exactly like an IBM PC but with a difference case badge. It allowed customers to add two additional full-height drives (typically 10MB MFM hard drives) and 7 usable expansion slots (excluding the one used for the MFM disk controller). And yes, with those full-height hard drives, it sounded like a jet engine.

Connecting the expansion chassis to the host PC were two expansion cards. One, the extender, was placed in the host PC....

Free Stuff, June and July 2018

junio 2018

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...

Still alive, just not blogging

It's been months without any update to this blog, and I feel sad about that. Nothing particular has happened to me, everything is proceeding as usual.

At the Osmocom project we've been making great progress on a variety of fronts, including

3GPP LCLS (Local Call, Local Switch)

Inter-BSC hand-over in osmo-bsc

load Based hand-over in osmo-bsc

reintroducing SCCPlite compatibility to the new BSC code in osmo-bsc / libosmo-sigtran

finishing the first release of the SIMtrace2 firmware

extending test coverage on all fronts, particularly in our TTCN-3 test suites

tons of fixes to the osmo-bts measurement processing / reporting

higher precision time of arrival reporting in osmo-bts

migrating osmocom.org services to new,...

Free Stuff, May 2018

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...