Hardware & Making

Digital Airwaves

Software Defined Radio Basics and some Modulation Theory
Clarke
Friederike
Encoding or decoding random radio-waveforms doesn't need incredible expensive hardware anymore which offers new possibilities for building up over-the-air communication systems. There are Software Defined Radios providing affordable cellular radio to remote villages, Community Radios are using SDR to build up digital radio networks and other cool stuff. Some basic knowledge what is going on in SDR Hard/Software as the influence of the samplerate, I/Q-data of the math behind the waterfall-diagram is helpful to have fun with SDR. Some theory on modulation techniques helps you to decode or encode your waveforms.
With a cheap DVB-T USB receiver used with some SDR-Software you can already have a look whats going on in the airwaves around you at certain frequencies. But what happens between the antenna and your computer display showing or decoding the signal? The talk should give basic information and background about SDR and some modulation theory. There will probably be a SDR Challenge at the Congress to practice you new skills.

Additional information

Type lecture
Language English

More sessions

12/27/18
Hardware & Making
hammes hacks
Dijkstra
When a electrical device needs to be a piece of art or used as a mechanical component, a printed circuit board is more than a piece of fiberglass with wires embedded in it. In chemical engineering applications internal holes which allow fluids to be transported through the PCB need to be placed in complex precise patterns. As art, holes can be used to create positive and negative space, allowing you to see a charlieplexed LED display as a snowflake. Creating complex shapes in PCB design software ...
12/27/18
Hardware & Making
Eliza
While a lot of projects are currently developing their own processors, mostly as open source in Verilog, VHDL or even Chisel, we miss the free process that actually manufactures these chips. So we're developing the "Libre Silicon" project, a portable semiconductor manufacturing process and technology, using only free and open source tools: We would like to introduce the project, who we are, what we are doing and where we are now.
12/27/18
Hardware & Making
Florian Euchner (Jeija)
Adams
<a href="https://www.sigfox.com/">Sigfox</a> is an emerging low-power wide-area network (LP-WAN) technology for IoT devices, comparable to <a href="https://lora-alliance.org/">LoRa</a>. This talk recounts my analysis of Sigfox's radio protocol and presents an open reference implementation of an alternative Sigfox protocol stack. It confirms that while Sigfox ensures authenticity and integrity, transmitted payloads are not confidential. This presentation is targeted at a technical audience with ...
12/27/18
Hardware & Making
zaolin
Dijkstra
Open Source firmware ist ein Begriff seit 1999 wo LinuxBIOS (coreboot) und u-boot als Projekt starteten. Heute nach fast 20 Jahren ist endlich Open Source firmware bei den Herstellern von Hardware angekommen: Google Chromebooks - coreboot Facebook Open Compute Hardware - coreboot / LinuxBoot Purism Laptops - coreboot Microsoft Olympus - TianoCore Microsoft Surface - TianoCore IBM Power 9 - Hostboot / Skiboot ARM Hardware - ARM Trusted Firmware Intel Minnowboard - TianoCore, coreboot A lot ...
12/28/18
Hardware & Making
Tim 'mithro' Ansell
Clarke
The <a href="http://symbiflow.github.io">SymbiFlow project</a> aims to be the "GCC of FPGAs" - a fully open source toolchain supporting, multiple FPGAs from different vendors. Allowing compilation from Verilog to bitstream without touching vendor provided tools, it includes support for large modern FPGAs like the Lattice ECP5 and Xilinx 7 series. These FPGAs can be used for things previously out of reach of FOSS tools, things like high resolution video and many gigabit networking. We have also ...
12/28/18
Hardware & Making
Clifford Wolf
Clarke
Project IceStorm provides the first end-to-end open source FPGA toolchain, was originally presented at 32c3, and only targetted Lattice iCE40 FPGAs. nextpnr is the next big step for open source FPGA tools, providing a retargetable open source FPGA place-and-route tool that will enable open source flows for many different FPGAs from many different vendors.
12/28/18
Hardware & Making
Mike Sperber
Borg
Teaching beginners how to program is often <i>hard</i>. We love building programs, and seeing our loved ones struggle with this is painful. Showing them how to copy-paste a few example programs and change a few parameters is easy, but bridging from there to building substantial programs is a different game entirely. This talk is about how to teach programming successfully, through comprehensible <i>design recipes</i>, which anyone can follow, using languages and tools designed for beginners. ...