Hello everyone, apologies for a long time between updates.  We've been busy working, and have neglected to communicate here at Hackaday.io.  We've been hard at work since winning the $10,000 from Hackaday/Supplyframe.  Here's where we're at:

The Boondock Echo team has five members: three full-time programmers, hardware engineers, and one adviser.

We designed and built a prototype board -- it failed spectacularly due to bad parts acquired during the silicon shortage.  So we reverted to the dev-board we used during the Hackaday contest.  We've added a "side-kick" board that allows us to attenuate the signal and potentially interface with other radios.  

The MVP (minimum viable product) features work -- you can hook up a boondock echo to a baofeng radio tuned to a particular frequency and capture all traffic.  No internet is required.  You can also (via the UART interface) transmit audio at prescribed intervals, start and stop recordings, set up the wifi, control the sensitivity, file length, etc.  In an emergency, you can put one or more Boondock Echos on frequencies of interest and capture all the traffic.  If there are two or more transmissions at once, you listen to one transmission, and play the missed one back a few moments later when it's convenient.  Or, if you are away from your radio for a time and want to find out if you missed any important contacts, you can play back any traffic you missed while you were away.  

But the Boondock Echo really shines when you give it access to the internet.  There you can de-noise, transcribe, translate, and transmit messages to one or many boondock echos at once.  For around $50 (final price tbd) for a radio and a Boondock Echo, you can deploy a miniature repeater network across your city or around the world.

We'll make some videos in the upcoming weeks/months to demonstrate functionality and post them here.  But in the meantime, here's our path forward.

We're currently in the middle of a "pre-beta" test.  We've given two Boondock Echos to expert Amateur Radio operators we know to be fault-tolerant.  They've got them for one more week before we debrief them about their experiences.  Then we'll take their feedback, improve the software and hardware experiences, and deploy to another 18-20 people.  After that, we'll do 100.  Our plan is to scale slowly and learn as we go.

If you'd like to participate, please leave your contact information in the form below!

https://forms.gle/rEmz7MUJ2ZoFD2Fs6