Most test equipment arrives as a sealed black box with a datasheet and a licence key. That isn't the case with anything from Great Scott Gadgets - they put the community first in more ways than one.

Founded by hardware designer Michael Ossmann, they are a small engineering team building test and development tools for software-defined radio, sub-1 GHz wireless, and USB. Every design they ship is open source - schematics, board files, firmware and host software are all published online, much of the hardware carries Open Source Hardware Association certification, and they only take on project work that can be released openly. For you, that means reading the RF front end, patching the firmware, and verifying exactly what the instrument is doing to your signal.

Software-Defined Radio. The HackRF line is where most people start. The HackRF Pro is a half-duplex transceiver covering 100 kHz to 6 GHz over USB-C. Add the Opera Cake to route between multiple antenna ports automatically by frequency or time. For focused sub-1 GHz work, the YARD Stick One transmits and receives ASK, OOK and GFSK and is driven straight from Python via RfCat.

USB and Hardware Interfacing. The Cynthion is an FPGA-based USB multitool that captures Low, Full and High-Speed traffic and can emulate devices, so you can watch a link and stand in for one end of it with the same board. The GreatFET One is a scriptable USB peripheral built around an NXP LPC4330, with two USB ports so it can sit in the middle of a connection, plus 100 expansion pins for logic analysis, protocol bridging and bit-banging.

Because the whole stack is open, these tools drop into the software you already use - GNU Radio, SDRangel, inspectrum and RfCat - with Python APIs throughout rather than a closed vendor application. Great Scott Gadgets also publish their SDR with HackRF course, technical reports and past project documentation as free open access material.

Not sure which tool fits your bench? Get in touch with us here at Core Electronics, or head to our Maker Forum to talk through your project.