From a random thought to boards in hand.
HellzGate didn't start in a lab. It started as an itch — I wanted to actually see the wireless world around me, and one little radio was never going to be enough. So I sketched a box full of them and started building. Here's how it went.
A random thought
What if instead of one radio sniffing the air, I had a whole cluster of them working together — each one on its own channel, all reporting back to one place? One radio shows you a keyhole. I wanted the whole door.
A scrap paper sketch
It started as a scribble — a rectangle, a row of little boxes for the nodes, arrows pointing to a "brain," and a screen on the front. That doodle is basically the layout the board still uses today. Sometimes the dumb-looking sketch is the whole plan.
The breadboard era
Next came the sprawling prototype — a pile of modules, a spider-web of jumper wires, and way more nodes than any breadboard should hold. Ugly, held together by stubbornness, but it worked. It proved the whole idea: a master herding a bank of nodes really could scan wide and log clean.
Turning the mess into a PCB
The first custom carrier turned the prototype into real hardware and exposed the engineering work the production platform needed. That original design is now retired; the lessons from it are feeding the current board.
FullGate takes shape
Real hardware testing proved the core concept and exposed the details that needed to be strengthened. HellzGate firmware is now running on ESP32-C5 hardware, the final FullGate schematic is complete, and PCB layout is underway.
FullGate, then MiniGate
The lessons from the field prototypes are now locked into FullGate, the first official HellzGate C5 release. PCB layout and firmware development are moving forward now. MiniGate is planned as a future compact C5 platform after FullGate is fully validated.
Prototypes that earned the final design.
V1 and V2 were working engineering platforms used to prove the multi-node concept and uncover the power, communication, integration and mechanical lessons informing HellzGate C5 FullGate. These are the real boards that helped move the project from an idea toward a production-ready design.