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Very cool. Have you all done any firmware/software hacking?
by 18pfsmt 15y ago
Very cool. Have you all done any firmware/software hacking?
- evilpie 15y agoCould you estimate the price of this thing, as the FBI told him it was expensive (and at least the batteries seem to be).
- 18pfsmt 15y agoOff the cuff BOM for this thing is on the order of $30 in 1K quantities (maybe add 20% for government bureaucracy).
- kwiens 15y agoFor the manufacturer, maybe. But then you have to factor in bribes to the federal procurement officers and junkets to Atlantic City to land the contract, and then medical payments for the workers who burned themselves hand-soldering resistors on that board. That's gotta up the price to at least $3K/unit or so! :-)
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y agoCan't really. Cost of BOM bears no relationship to selling price. His post below says it costs about $30 in 1k quantities. So estimating about $50 in 10pc prices, if I were building a few for a government agency/large corporation, ignoring NRE charges I'd probably price them upwards of $1000 each. This is not exactly something you can purchase at Best Buy...
- kwiens 15y agoWe have not—I had limited time with the device at Wired's office. We powered it on and used a frequency analyzer on it, but that was the extent of our investigation. We were concerned that black helicopters might show up if we left it on too long. But I hope someone else does!
- huhtenberg 15y agoDon't you guys have a Faraday cage for this sort of teardown?
- kwiens 15y agoWhat, you mean for all the other devices we take apart that regularly phone home to their manufacturer, who would show up at a moment's notice in a black helicopter to put an immediate halt to our technical analysis? Of course! We have to block RF transmissions all the time!
- burgerbrain 15y agoDidn't Apple have that one reporter guy who was sent the 'lost prototype iphone' SWAT'd?