Wow. It's been a wonderful week.

I got to know about our nomination this Monday. It's been... Shocking. Both for me and for my teammates. Now, the project feels much more real. We've got the means for doing actual work on it, and I personally can't wait!

First of all, meet @joeyfreelandjr! He's a volunteer with an impressive background in electronics that has the skills we're looking for. With his help, it's now possible to shine more light on modulation schemes of the data and, consecutively, write a routine that would decode this data.

As for me, I'm researching opportunities on writing a custom Python block for decoding packet data and outputting it the way we want it to be displayed for our decoding efforts. There's a lot to be learned though, and I need to find a comfortable way for tweaking GNU/Radio routines and actually seeing the results in less time than a minute or so. I'm also looking for a nice book that'd explain all the concepts to me so that I have better understanding of what I'm dealing with. I've found a person in our hackerspace that has a really good understanding of what's going on and I've went through a small crash course involving Audacity, Spek and handling raw data in general. Also, I think I should make a workstation for this project. I have a Pi3 currently just sitting there unused, should handle this task well. I just think I need a bigger microSD card for it, as well as add an external HDD =)

One of the most interesting things for me so far is getting a EX1150 base station. I can finally afford it and will order one as soon as the money arrives. Then, I'll hack into it! I'll try my best to dump its firmware because I can't wait to take a look at what it can be hiding - such as binaries with the communication algorithms in them! If those binaries are more or less easy to disassemble, I'll have very important information about the data we're dealing with - it's going to save a lot of time and research effort.

Also, I'll soon be looking for a good SDR. We need some usual RTL-SDR dongles so that we can make sure our project is repeatable using them, but I'll also need something with slightly better hardware and larger bandwidth for initial stages of research where I can't afford to add problems like "hardware-not-good-enough" to problems like "trying-to-understand-the-thing". In other words, when I make sure my software is conceptually working on "perfect" hardware, I can focus on hardware-related problems.

As for now, it's my Sunday project, meaning that I can spend on average one day at a week on it - which is actually a lot of time, considering all of the projects I'm working on =) I'm also going to have a "field trip" to Estonia - as soon as I get an SDR. Not to mention that writing GNU/Radio blocks perfect enough is going to take more than a week of quite concentrated work. With all the problems we'll solve along the way, we hope to make a good competition in Assistive Technology . At least, now that the funding question is solved, we have the means to participate - thanks to Hackaday Prize!