Elizabeth Hendrex of Great Scott Gadgets announced the general availability of Cynthion, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-powered gadget designed to provide a low-cost peek into the world of Universal Serial Bus (USB), from packet capture to creating new devices.
“Great Scott Gadgets’ FPGA-based hardware platform with LUNA gateware is your new go-to tool for discovering and exploring the world of USB at a fraction of the cost of off-the-shelf USB analyzers,” Hendrex said of Cynthion. “Whether you have USB experience or are learning for the first time, Cynthion is a great and versatile addition to your hardware experimentation toolbox.”
Great Scott Gadgets’ USB tool Cynthion is now available from resellers worldwide, including Adafruit. (📷: Adafruit)
LUNA is Great Scott Gadgets’ Amaranth HDL library for manipulating USB through an FPGA, with Cynthion serving as the primary hardware platform for it. The company has also released two Cynthion-compatible tools to demonstrate what’s possible: Packetry, which turns Cynthion into a USB low-, full-, and high-speed man-in-the-middle packet capture and analysis tool, at a significantly lower price than competing products; and Moondancer, a backend for Facedancer that lets you implement your own custom USB devices in Python.
“The combination of our LUNA gateware and the Facedancer library makes Cynthion a versatile USB research and development tool,” Hendrex explains. “Facedancer allows you to quickly and easily create or tamper with real, not just emulated, USB devices without any prior experience in digital hardware design, HDL, or FPGA architecture.”
After a successful crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply, Cynthion is now available through Great Scott Gadgets resellers, with prices ranging from $199.99 to $210 with the aluminum enclosure and as low as $149.99 for the board alone. Links to retailers worldwide can be found on the company’s website, while the design files are available on GitHub under a permissive version of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2.
