🐝 ADSBee 1090U is shipping soon!

ADSBee 1090U preorders have been open for a few weeks, and the manufacturing side of things is progressing well! First articles off the production line passed functional tests, and the full run of 100x receivers has been completed and delivered from the contract manufacturter. I’m working on a few updates to firmware along with design and manufacturing of some accessories like the 3D-printed dual band antenna case before these devices ship to customers. Devices are on track to ship in early July (sometime in the next week or two). Many thanks to those of you who have already ordered an ADSBee 1090U kit! I’m excited to get these receivers into your hands.

The first panel of ADSBee 1090U’s (one was removed for testing).

Here’s a case (a honeycomb? a hive?) of ADSBees waiting for functional test and shipping!

As noted in the product description and preorder announcement, ADSBee 1090U’s will ship with single-band receiver firmware, and full dual band capability will be enabled via a future firmware update. I’m doing everything I can to convince myself that the receiver hardware on the dual-band radio is rock solid before shipping out these devices, so that the dual-band firmware update goes smoothly. I expect to have dual-band packet receive functionality working before devices ship, but a fully polished dual band receiver implementation (with full decode and reporting capabilities) will take a bit of time to get right–and I’m excited to have the help of the community in testing those new features!

🩳 ADSBee PoE Pant is working!

Thanks to some firmware tweaks that will be available in the upcoming 0.8.0 firmware release, operation over Ethernet using the ADSBee 1090 PoE Pant is reliable! If you are interested in purchasing a device from the prototype run, please shoot me an email or a discord message. I have a very limited quantity of boards available for users who would like to try them out, and will be working on setting up proper manufacturing for these PCBAs once the dust settles from the devices that are currently in flight (likely sometime in early August).

The photo below shows what the PoE pant looks like when it’s stacked onto an ADSBee 1090 (or 1090U). I’m working on a 3D printed enclosure that can fit the ADSBee 1090 PoE pant and mount the board stack with some proper standoffs. The ADSBee 1090 + PoE pant can be powered over PoE (as the name suggests), or via USB (shown below), if you want to run network comms over a non-PoE Ethernet cable.

For best performance, it’s recommended to disable the WiFi Station and WiFi Access Point functionalities on the ADSBee when using Ethernet, since the network stacks seem to like hogging the same parts of heap memory. It’s possible that this limitation could be removed in a future firmware revision with some additional optimization, but for now ADSBee 1090’s running Ethernet should be considered Ethernet-only network devices (UART / USB / etc still work fine).

💽 Firmware Version 0.8.0

I’ve been working on a significant firmware update for ADSBee 1090’s and 1090U’s this month. Firmware version 0.8.0 introduces a significant refactor of the coprocessor SPI bus driver at the heart of what makes ADSBee a multi-processor device, providing significantly improved communication bandwidth before processors and much smoother OTA updates (which place the coprocessor SPI bus under heavy load by transfering large firmware images between devices). This firmware update is currently on Release Candidate 5 in case you’d like to try it out–but I’m working on squeezing a few more small tweaks before making it official. Stay tuned for an announcement when the firmware is ready!

🤖 See you at Open Sauce!

ADSBee will be at Open Sauce in San Mateo, CA from July 18-20th. If you are in the area, I’d love to meet you! We have a number of fun ADSBee-related projects and displays planned for the event, and I’ve once again ordered a truly ludicrous quantity of ADSBee stickers. There will also be a limited quantity of ADSBee 1090U receivers and accessories for sale, in case you desire the instant gratification of Purchasing a Good or Service from a Real Live Person (one of my favorite activities as a consumer). I hope to see you there!