Kickstarter

No, I’m not going to tell you about some cool project on Kickstarter I backed. Instead, I’m going to tell you about one I helped CREATE!

Some time back, a couple of guys, Casey and Morgan, who had an idea for a project approached me asking if I’d be willing to help out with the project. It sounded like an interesting deal, so I helped them out where possible.

Now we’ve gotten the project to a point where we feel comfortable that we’ve got it in the bag, so we’ve run a Kickstarter campaign! You can see it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/749835103/hamshield-for-arduino-vhf-uhf-transceiver/

Yes. It’s over already.

Honestly, I’m a bit surprised by the level of support we’ve seen. We have a pretty narrow target market, and yet here we are, funded several times over.

For those who aren’t familiar, the project is an Arduino shield that adds Amateur Radio functionality. It’s a tri-band transceiver (2m, 1.25m, 70cm bands), based on the same line of radio chips found in the Baofeng models.

We’ve also started work on a number of example Arduino sketches, and a library to abstract some of the work away. You can find that on our github at https://github.com/EnhancedRadioDevices/HamShield

And yes, it is open source hardware and software.

We’re really excited to take this work the last mile and get it into production and shipped out to all of our backers. I’d love to see what people manage to use it for.