AERIS-10 Radar's Cost Claim Depends on Whose Bill of Materials
Hardware / explainer
AERIS-10 Radar's Cost Claim Depends on Whose Bill of Materials
Two outlets price the open-source 10.5 GHz phased-array radar's long-range version at $7,200 and $13,000 to $15,000, and neither reports an independent range test.
The AERIS-10, an open-source 10.5 GHz phased-array radar, is described as 95 percent cheaper than commercial units in some coverage, but two outlets that priced its bill of materials reached figures that differ by nearly a factor of two. TechSpot put the long-range version at about $7,200; CNX Software put it at $13,000 to $15,000.
What the repository says
The project's GitHub repository credits Nawfal Motii of ABAC INDUSTRY, and says it began in a small workshop in Morocco. It offers two versions: the AERIS-10N Nexus, with a 3 km range and an 8x16 patch antenna array at about 1 W per channel, and the AERIS-10E Extended, with a 20 km range, a 32x16 slotted waveguide array and 10 W gallium-nitride amplifiers on 16 channels.
Both use 10.5 GHz pulsed linear-frequency-modulated waveforms, meaning the transmitted tone sweeps across a band so the receiver can resolve targets more finely. The repository lists electronic beam steering of plus or minus 45 degrees, an ADAR1000 beamformer, and an STM32F746 microcontroller. It marks the project Alpha, with features still in progress, and shows 348 commits, 25.8k stars, 5.9k forks and 8 open issues.
Stars are not deployments; Paperclip's 90,000 GitHub stars rest on one developer, and the same caution applies here. A repository can gather 25,000 of them from people who saved a link, and the counts here say nothing about how many boards have been built or how many worked.
Two bills of materials
TechSpot's April 17 report cites roughly $5,000 for the 10N and $7,200 for the 10E, against commercial phased-array radars it prices at $120,000 to $200,000. CNX Software's March 15 write-up estimated $5,000 to $8,000 for the 10N and $13,000 to $15,000 for the long-range model, which it calls the 10X, saying the 16 power amplifiers add $7,200 to the base build.
The reading that reconciles them is that $7,200 is the amplifier line, not the total. If so, the saving against $120,000 is about 88 to 89 percent, not 94 percent. The repository page does not state a total.
- AERIS-10E, TechSpot7200 $
- AERIS-10X, CNX Software (low)13K $
- AERIS-10X, CNX Software (high)15K $
- Commercial phased array, low end (TechSpot)120K $
Source: TechSpot (Apr. 17, 2026); CNX Software (Mar. 15, 2026)
The two sources also disagree on the processor. The repository page lists an XC7A50T FPGA, while CNX lists an XC7A100T; the parts differ in logic capacity and price.
The 20 km claim
None of the pages fetched for this piece reports an independent range measurement. The 20 km figure is the designer's. It also runs ahead of what the published parameters suggest, on a rough calculation.
In the basic radar equation, received power falls with the fourth power of range, so range scales with the fourth root of transmit power times antenna gain squared. The 10E has 10 times the per-channel power of the 10N and four times the elements (512 against 128). Gain rises about fourfold, gain squared sixteenfold, and the combined factor of 160 raises range by about 3.6 times, or roughly 10.7 km from 3 km. Reaching 20 km, a 6.7 times gain, needs a larger target, longer integration or a lower detection threshold than the 3 km figure assumed. The pages do not say which target size either number was quoted for.
Rules the project cannot waive
CNX said the project is not a finished kit and that builders must verify FCC compliance and local authorizations. TechSpot said radar systems operate in tightly controlled frequency bands in most jurisdictions and that the project takes RF, embedded and mechanical expertise. The hardware licence is CERN-OHL-P, chosen after community feedback that MIT lacked the legal protections hardware needs; the firmware is MIT.
TechSpot said a Crowd Supply campaign was planned for the third quarter of 2026. What would change my read is a build log with a measured detection range against a named target, since that one number would settle both the cost and the range arguments. For another project that sells buildable hardware to developers, see Feather Robotics' modular humanoid.
Sources
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