Level RF | Hacker News Reader

Level RF

hscott.net

58 pointsblueintegral11 comments

> In the summer of 2012, I started a company with some other Georgia Tech students called Level RF. We went through Y Combinator and lots of really cool and interesting things happened, which you should ask me about sometime. The company ended up pivoting into Soylent, but this page is to release all the hardware and software I developed while I worked there.

Alright, I'll ask.

How the hell did that happen? The company went from designing RF electronics to manufacturing processed food? What?

   I had never done any RF engineering before, so I taught 
   myself using amateur radio books and classic resources 
   like the Handbook of Black Magic, as well as some 
   mentors from Stanford and the 50 MHz and Up club who 
   were kind enough to answer my questions. I went through 
   4 iterations of the design in as many months and the 
   progression is pretty interesting...

Incredible. It's kind of unfortunate that hardly anyone who reads this will understand just how impressive this degree of autodidacticsm is, given the boards you ended up (successfully) designing. Nice going!

Narrowband signals like these aren't so hard to deal with and there's a long history of radio hacking. The ARRL, QST and thousands of "radio hackers" made up the HAM community for decades.

The frequencies used by the cable companies aren't that high either - designing a board for a modern Intel processor is far harder. The thing that made these frequencies hard for CATV companies is that the signals were so wideband. A typical coaxial cable carries signals between 54 and 1000 MHz ... you're burning a lot of bias current to keep the system linear (thus avoiding distortion).

What you're missing is that he had to tackle a large number of disciplines and execute them at least halfway competently. Lots of people can do antenna work. Lots of people can do RF design. Lots of people can do DSP. Lots of people can do HDL. Lots of people can do C. And there are a fair number of people who could do all of the above... but 99% of them are too chicken to try. That's what earns my respect, more than anything else.

I just want to attest to the level of tenacity and dedication needed to accomplish what was done at Level without a significant RF background. PCB design is one thing, but duplicating some of the functionality of expensive software defined radios as part of a commercially viable product is a completely different beast.

Furthermore, Hunter is, without a doubt, one of the most amazing Electrical and Computer engineers I've ever met. Fortunately, he's just as passionate about teaching as he is about engineering, and spent a large amount of his time at Georgia Tech teaching and inspiring other students about electrical engineering. I'm extremely grateful to call him a mentor and a friend, and I definitely encourage HN readers to check out some more of his projects at his website.

It is pretty bold to start an RF company with no RF background. It sounds like it was a fun adventure. I wonder why the author didn't stay at Soylent after the pivot.

Well, I want to be really good at electrical and computer engineering, so I wanted to work on problems relevant to that. If I stayed at Soylent, I'd have devoted all of my time to becoming really knowledgeable about nutrition, a field I know very little about right now. I'm really excited for how successful Soylent has been and I'm super proud of my friends over there, I just wanted to work on a different kind of problem.

I've found the HackRF One [1] to be the next step up from the $20 TV tuners an Amazon [2] and the Ettus Research $2700 dream setup [3].

[1] https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/

[2] http://www.amazon.com/RioRand-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-Def...

[3] http://www.ettus.com/product/details/E310-KIT

Or get the hackrf blue which is almost identical but $100 cheaper http://hackrfblue.com/

I submitted this 11 hours ago and it got zero votes during the first several hours. I thought it was lost to the depths of HN, how did people find it so many hours later?

HN mods can re-promote a post if they feel it deserves another chance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157698

Reply on news.ycombinator.com