Support for running OsmocomBB on FCDEV3B hardware

Mychaela Falconia mychaela.falconia at gmail.com
Sat Nov 25 23:13:43 UTC 2017


Hello FreeCalypso community,

As I expected, I have received a number of inquiries from various
people about using our FCDEV3B hardware to run our competitors'
OsmocomBB software.  From what I can tell, these inquiries have been
coming from practically-minded people rather than ideological zealots,
and the reason they need to use OsmocomBB software rather than ours is
not because we are the wrong kind of free, but because these people
are doing security research or network monitoring/analysis kinds of
applications for which they need the researcher-oriented functions of
OsmocomBB like Wireshark integration which are lacking in our end-use-
oriented TI-based firmware.

Over the past couple of months I've been responding to such inquiries
with a list of defects in OsmocomBB software and a list of problems
that will occur if someone tries running the official mainline version
of OsmocomBB from osmocom.org on our hardware.  This week, however, I
decided to do something about these defects, and produced a modified
version of OsmocomBB's target firmware that works correctly on our
FCDEV3B, along with a bunch of fixes for their pre-existing Calypso
targets:

ftp://ftp.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/FreeCalypso/obb-fcmods-r1.tar.bz2

The official mainline version of OsmocomBB at osmocom.org is still as
broken as before, but that is their problem, not ours.  What matters
is that if someone is interested in buying one of our FCDEV3B boards
with the intent of using it for OsmocomBB, either solely or in
addition to our FreeCalypso firmware, we now have a working solution
for such prospective customers.

Here is the updated version of the FCDEV3B User's Manual:

https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/fcdev3b/fcdev3b-userman-1.11.pdf

Now I need to update the FCDEV3B product page on our website.

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
Mychaela aka The Mother


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