A more extreme version of the ADC/DAC projects mentioned here is my (old) project that built a Bluetooth transceiver using just an FPGA and an antenna (and a low pass filter if you don't want the FCC coming after you): https://github.com/newhouseb/onebitbt
Tl;dr: if you blast in/out the right 5GHz binary digital signal from a SERDES block on an FPGA connected to a short wire you can talk to your phone!
To be fair, my "misbehaving corporate firewall" is actually my apartment that has building-managed internet wherein everyone is NAT'ed to the same fiber connection.
For whatever reason, SYN flooding detection triggers when you do more than a few TCP connections per second which makes most TCP-based things super frustrating and their IT is clueless as to how to fix it.
Tailscale is my favorite (product) discovery of 2022. I initially set it up to use as a VPN to get around a misbehaving corporate firewall and accidentally realized it solved a whole bunch of other problems I didn't realize I had. Usually a new product doesn't even live up to the intended use case and so TS is really anomalous IMHO in how good it is.
- SSH'ing into a raspberry pi I have at home that does random IoT stuff.
- Accessing servers on my local dev machine from other devices for testing (i.e. a Windows box or phone)
- Giving access to production bastion devices without publicly exposing anything to the internet.
And best of all I don't have to fiddle with the usual networking stuff. It just works. Kudos on the raise!
Non-disclaimer: I have no relation to anyone on the team. Tailscale is just a delight to use.
Tl;dr: if you blast in/out the right 5GHz binary digital signal from a SERDES block on an FPGA connected to a short wire you can talk to your phone!