[Noisebridge-discuss] GNURadio/USRP, Eagle, and Open Source

[Eric Michaud]

Mitch has said I should put a feeler here.

USRP(/Universal Software Radio Peripheral)/ is the base radio board for
the GNURadio software radio project.  It can be used for manipulating
the airwaves, generating a GSM Base station, WiFi, or doing pure
research in next generation algorithms for high speed data processing
over the air.

It claims to be an Open Source project, but I find that it really isn't
that open. Ettus Research the company which sells the boards doesn't
release the gerber, PCB, or eagle files, just a pdf with the schematic
traces and nothing else. Which doesn't really allow lots of people to
send off the designs to a PCB house or rework the design to work with
something they want to do, or take two of the control ports on it off,
and make it half the size.(Among many other things one could do, OR
IMPROVE IT!)



Comments by Eric Blossom of GNURadio/USRP folks.
http://old.nabble.com/USRP---USRP2-td23093717.html

What they have released as per the email.
http://www.ettus.com/download

By virtue of this I'm a little torn, and a little motivated now.

The main reasons I'm doing this is because I want to modify the boards
to work in smaller footprint and I don't need the 4 ports just 2. Plus
the $750 is a quite a bit steep for what I need it do it.

So it's non-trivial to make your own boards as I've seen and I would
love if Eric Blossom and Matt Ettus would release the files to the
community which they can. I hope they do. Would save a lot of work on my
part, as they have already done it. If not, I'll put in the time to
generate them and release them fully crediting their work on it.

Now I was wondering who would be interested in working temporarily on
converting these schematics into actual gerber and eagle files. Hell I
could would do most of the work(essentially all) myself but I don't have
copy of eagle that can do more than the standard 100 MM size boards.

If anyone has some interest in opening this up a bit more, you can
contact me off list. Again I could do the whole thing myself I just
don't have a full version of eagle to do it. ;)

Cheers,
-Eric.
Pumping Station: One

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