[Noisebridge-discuss] Anyone willing to part with their USRP?

[Josh Myer]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:

> Well, i looked into my assumption that the USRP was truly "open-source" and
> this is what i found:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/
>
> "The schematics are available, the PCB files and gerbers are not."
>
> so, we would have to eagle-up a board from scratch, but hey!  it's worth
> it!  The thing is, it would probably take multiple layers, and for various
> reasons, we would not make the boards ourselves.
>
> As for the actual soldering, no it is not that hard to solder TSSOP (is
> there anything finer than that?) even if you're not Mike Kahn.  I have
> literally soldered shit like that with my 100-watt W100P and solder braid.
> It's fun and easy, and we have all the tools at noisebridge (the hot-air
> soldering machine can take a 166-pin MILF package off a board without
> hurting it)
>
>
I've done TSSOP (the smd1d6 used it:
http://www.youtube.com/appliedplatonics#p/u/5/bqiF1TcT5Cg), it's not a
really big deal, but I'm not keen on hand-soldering a couple thousand pads
at pitches that tight.

So, in other words, if you and me and 3 other people want a USRP, we should
> start by making a parts list and sitting down on Eagle for a minute.  There
> will always be more comers after we find success.
>
> You think the SMD badge kit is hot and makes you money?  Wait until you
> have a USRP kit.
>
>
I couldn't make money on a USRP kit.  There are only a handful of people who
can assemble them, and the price wouldn't be much better than a USRP,
especially not when you consider how long it takes to solder the things.

I did look into this a bit, more to see if there was room for a ~$350 SDR
board.  Once the quantity-100 BOM got to $150, I stopped looking.

I'd love to do this for shits and giggles, but I really don't have time for
the learning right now.  I'm currently playing catch-up on the theory side
of SDR, and would like to focus on software applications once I have a
handle on it, instead of implementing the circuits side.

It'd be awesome if a handful of the right people (ie: already experts in one
part of the problem) got together to do this, but I'm really not one of
them.  I've been doing electronics for ~15 years, but I'm no EE, just a
mathematician/linguist who fell into the wrong company.
--
/jbm
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