Great Scott Gadgets' Cynthion Is a Flexible FPGA-Powered Tool for USB Analysis and Experimentation
Now in general availability, following a crowdfunding campaign, Cynthion is ready to fulfill all your USB hacking needs.
Great Scott Gadgets' Elizabeth Hendrex has announced general availability of Cynthion, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-powered gadget designed to let you peer into the world of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) for less — from packet capture all the way to new device creation.
"This FPGA-based hardware platform from Great Scott Gadgets powered by LUNA gateware is your new go-to tool for discovering and exploring the world of USB at a fraction of the cost of commercial USB analyzers," Hendrex explains of the Cynthion. "Whether you’re experienced with USB or you're new and learning about it, Cynthion is a great multipurpose addition to your hardware experimentation toolbox!"
LUNA is Great Scott Gadgets' Amaranth HDL library of working with USB through an FPGA, with Cynthion serving as a first-class hardware platform for same. The company has also released two Cynthion-compatible tools, to demonstrate what's possible: Packetry, which turns the Cynthion into a USB Low-, Full-, or High-Speed man-in-the-middle packet capture and analysis tool priced considerably below rival designs; and Moondancer, a backend for Facedancer — a tool that lets you implement your own custom USB devices in Python.
"Combined with our LUNA gateware and Facedancer libraries, Cynthion becomes a versatile USB research and development tool," Hendrex explains. "Facedancer makes it quick and easy to create or tamper with real USB devices — not just emulations — even if you don't have experience with digital-hardware design, HDL, or FPGA architecture!"
Following a successful crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply, Cynthion is now listed for sale at Great Scott Gadgets' resellers for between $199.99 and $210 with aluminum enclosure, or as low as $149.99 as a bare board; links to global stockists can be found on the company's website. Design files, meanwhile, are available on GitHub under the permissive variant of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2.