

Level RF - blueintegral
http://www.hscott.net/level/

======
ohazi
> 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?

------
CamperBob2

       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!

~~~
smoyer
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).

~~~
CamperBob2
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.

------
FlyingLawnmower
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.

------
blackguardx
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.

~~~
blueintegral
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/RioRand-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-
Def...](http://www.amazon.com/RioRand-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-
Defined/dp/B008XFDHWW)

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

~~~
platz
Or get the hackrf blue which is almost identical but $100 cheaper
[http://hackrfblue.com/](http://hackrfblue.com/)

------
blueintegral
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?

~~~
sp332
HN mods can re-promote a post if they feel it deserves another chance.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157698)

