Tracking satellites with an Arduino
posted Nov 21st 2011 2:01pm by Brian Benchofffiled under: arduino hacks
The guys over at brainwagon just finished up ANGST, the Arduino n’ Gameduinio Satellite Tracker, a build that displays 160 different satellites in Earth orbit on any SVGA monitor.
The build is of course based off an Arduino and Gameduino shield. A real-time clock is always needed for a satellite tracker, so a DS1307 RTC is thrown into the mix. The satellite data is stored on a 128KB EEPROM that is big enough to hold 750 different satellites and orbits.
The software side of things is a bit trickier. The guys at brainwagon used [James Miller]‘s very popular and very old-school PLAN-13 sat tracking software. This orbit calculation program was published in 1983 and has since been ported from BBC Basic to just about every system imaginable.
Once the ANGST is hooked up and powered on, it reads the real-time clock and calculates the position of a satellite. This is done in real-time and updated every three minutes. On the screen, the last orbit (and a little more) is displayed along with the sun and the location of the ANGST. You might not find something like ANGST at the Space Command at NORAD, but we can’t think of a better way to keep track of the cubesats and spy sats above our heads.
That is awesome, but it needs a few things to be truly useful:
1. Able to get recent ephemeris data on its own. Any more than week-old data becomes unreliable.
2. Updates more than once every 3 minutes. A typical ISS pass is about 5-7 minutes, so by the time you get the prediction, it could be half over…
Still, it’s an awesome idea. And it would be fun to have an old LCD mounted on a wall that displayed this 24/7!