Tracking The ISS Made Easy

If you made something blink, and now it’s time for you to make something move, something like a point-to-a-satellite tracker is a great idea. [Farid Rener] made this moving arrow that always points at the ISS, and documented it nicely to boot.

And there’s a little bit of everything here, from orbital mechanics and fetching the two-line elements (TLE) from the web, to writing the code to translate that into the tabletop machine’s coordinate system. It looks like [Farid] hadn’t done much 3D CAD before, so he got a chance to stretch those muscles too. Finally, it served as an introduction to resource-constrained programming: “This was the first time I’ve had to think about the size of a compiled binary – the most frustrating part was figuring out that using a C++ stringstream was adding too much code to my binary.”

[Farid] is learning a lot here, and you might too. For instance, using pencil lead (graphite) as a lubricant on sliding 3D-printed parts is new to us, but makes sense. We’ll have to try that out.

And while this is a simple desktop tracker, with a lot more mechanical design, the same basics could be put to real use for pointing a receiver dish. Of course, who says you need fancy motors and computers to point a satellite dish anyway? If you work on your arm muscles a bit, you could become the satellite pointer.

3 thoughts on “Tracking The ISS Made Easy

  1. Graphite powder is a well known lubricant for keylocks and small (metal) machinery in general. IDK how it performs on plastics over time, though. I tend to use silicone grease.

    Just be aware it’s higly conductive so keep it away from anything electronic.

      1. heh i feel the opposite. the gadget doesn’t excite me at all because i’m already somewhat familiar with orbital mechanics but i think it’s actually potentially quite useful. highschool physics teachers, for example, are always looking for a classroom display that can encourage students to believe in the laws on a more concrete level. i could imagine a satellite-pointer could actually be somewhat effective at making students think.

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