Fresh hacks every day
Ahhh space. The final frontier. While many people dream of one day becoming an astronaut (and possibly battling aliens or cylons), it's a select few who actually make it their reality. Fortunately for us, there's a middle ground that allows the masses to still have some fun in the sky. Enter the "Pongsat" program - space experiments within a ping pong ball. Created by JP Aerospace, this free … [Read more...]
[Andrew Holme] wrote in to tell us about some work he's done to improve his scratch-built GPS receiver. He figured out a way to use the same hardware but double the number of satellites it can track to a total of eight. When we looked at the original hardware about a year ago it was limited to monitoring just four satellites. That's the bare minimum for calculating position data. This will not … [Read more...]
If you live in the Eastern portion of the United States and the skies are clear you can see a student built satellite flashing LEDs in Morse Code today. But don't worry. If you it's cloudy or if you live elsewhere there are several other opportunities to see it in the coming days. This is the Niwaka Fitsat-1. It was developed by students at the [Fukuoka Institute of Technology] and deployed … [Read more...]
Last week was the fifty year anniversary of the launching of Telstar 1, the first communications satellite. Take a look back at the marvel of the early technology as shown in this newsreel footage about the first broadcast. The first formal use was a speech by President Kennedy allowing most of Europe to "witness democracy at work". You've got to love that cold war era propaganda. In addition … [Read more...]
[David Prutchi] has an FTA (free-to-air) satellite dish. This means he can tune and watch freely available satellite television feeds. But this sounds much better than it actually is. There isn't much that's broadcasted unecrypted from satellites with the exception of a collection of religious channels. But he still uses the dish by using the FTA satellites to calibrate the alignment, then … [Read more...]
[Nate] over at Sparkfun put up a great tutorial for using the SPOT personal satellite communicator with just about any microcontroller. These personal satellite transmitters were originally intended to pair with the bluetooth module of a smart phone, allowing you to send a short 41-character message from anywhere in the world. Now, you can use these neat little boxes for getting data from remote … [Read more...]
Wii Nunchuk controlled Monotron Adding a bit of motion control to your music synthesizer turns out to be pretty easy. Here's an example of a Wii Nunchuk used to control a Monotron. [Thanks John] Hackers on the Moon and other space related goals Yep apparently a non-government backed expedition to the moon is in the works. But you've got to walk before you can crawl and one of the … [Read more...]
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