Satellites

14 Articles

Teardown 2019: A Festival Of Hacking, Art, And FPGAs

July 3, 2019 by 7 Comments

As hackers approached the dramatic stone entrance of Portland’s Pacific Northwest College of Arts, a group of acolytes belonging to The Church of Robotron beckoned them over, inviting them to attempt to earn the title of Mutant Saviour. The church uses hazardous environments, religious indoctrination, a 1980s arcade game and some seriously funny low tech hacks to test your abilities to save humanity. This offbeat welcome was a pretty good way to set the tone for Teardown 2019: an annual Crowd Supply event for engineers and artists who love hardware. Teardown is halfway between a conference and a party, with plenty of weird adventures to be had over the course of the weekend. Praise the Mutant! Embrace Futility! Rejoice in Error!

For those of us who failed to become the Mutant Saviour, there were plenty of consolation prizes. Kate Temkin and Mikaela Szekely’s talk on accessible USB tools was spectacular, and I loved following Sophi Kravitz’s journey as she made a remote-controlled blimp. Upstairs in the demo room, we had great fun playing with a pneumatic donut sprinkle pick and place machine from tinkrmind and Russell Senior’s hacked IBM daisywheel typewriter that prints ASCII art and runs a text-based Star Trek adventure game.

It wouldn’t be much of a hardware party if the end of the talks, demos and workshops meant the end of each day’s activities, but the Teardown team organised dinner and an afterparty in a different locations every night: Portland’s hackerspace ^H PDX, the swishy AutoDesk offices, and the vintage arcade game bar Ground Kontrol. There also was a raucous and hotly-contested scavenger hunt across the city, with codes to crack, locks to pick and bartenders to sweet talk into giving you the next clue (tip: tip).

Join me below for my favorite highlights of this three day (and night) festival.

Continue reading “Teardown 2019: A Festival Of Hacking, Art, And FPGAs” →

Katherine Scott: Earth’s Daily Photo Through 200 Cubesat Cameras

September 14, 2018 by 11 Comments

Every year at Supercon there is a critical mass of awesome people, and last year Sophi Kravitz was able to sneak away from the festivities for this interview with Katherine Scott. Kat was a judge for the 2017 Hackaday Prize. She specializes in computer vision, robotics, and manufacturing and was the image analytics team lead at Planet Labs when this interview was filmed.

You’re going to chuckle at the beginning of the video as Kat and Sophi recount the kind of highjinks going on at the con. In the hardware hacking area there were impromptu experiments in melting aluminum with gallium, and one of the afternoon’s organized workshop combined wood and high voltage to create lichtenberg figures. Does anyone else smell burning? Don’t forget to grab your 2018 Hackaday Superconference tickets and join in the fun this year!

Below you’ll find the interview which dives into Kat’s work with satellite imaging.

Continue reading “Katherine Scott: Earth’s Daily Photo Through 200 Cubesat Cameras” →

Aireon Hitchhikes On Iridium To Track Airplanes

December 27, 2017 by 21 Comments

SpaceX just concluded 2017 by launching 10 Iridium NEXT satellites. A footnote on the launch was the “hosted payload” on board each of the satellites: a small box of equipment from Aireon. They will track every aircraft around the world in real-time, something that has been technically possible but nobody claimed they could do it economically until now.

Challenge one: avoid adding cost to aircraft. Instead of using expensive satcom or adding dedicated gear, Aireon listen to ADS-B equipment already installed as part of international air traffic control modernization. But since ADS-B was designed for aircraft-to-aircraft and aircraft-to-ground, Aireon had some challenges to overcome. Like the fact ADS-B antenna is commonly mounted on the belly of an aircraft blocking direct path to satellite.

Challenge two: hear ADS-B everywhere and do it for less. Today we can track aircraft when they are flying over land, but out in the middle of the ocean, there are no receivers in range except possibly other aircraft. Aireon needed a lot of low-orbit satellites to ensure you are in range no matter where you are. Piggybacking on Iridium gives them coverage at a fraction of the cost of building their own satellites.

Continue reading “Aireon Hitchhikes On Iridium To Track Airplanes” →

Satellite Tracking With Friends

September 12, 2017 by 3 Comments

If you’re in the mood to track satellites, it’s a relatively simple task to look up one of a multitude of websites that can give you a list of satellites visible from your location. However, if you’re interested in using satellites to communicate with far-flung friends, you might be interested in this multi-point satellite tracker.

[Stephen Downward VA1QLE] developed the tracker to make it easier to figure out which satellites would be simultaneously visible to people at different locations on the Earth’s surface. This is useful for amateur radio, as signals can be passed through satellites with ham gear onboard (such as NO-44), or users can even chat over defunct military satellites.

[Stephen] claims the algorithm is inefficient, but calculations are made in a matter of a few seconds, so we’re not complaining. While it was originally designed for just two stations, it works with a near-infinite number of points. [Stephen] recommends verifying the tracks with another tool once calculated to ensure accuracy. The tool is accessible here, and the code is up on GitHub for your perusal.

Perhaps now you need a cost-effective satellite-tracking antenna? [Paul] has you covered.

Hack Space Debris At Your Peril

September 11, 2017 by 41 Comments

Who has dibs on space debris? If getting to it were a solved problem, it sure would be fun to use dead orbital hardware as something of a hacker’s junk bin. Turns out there is some precedent for this, and regulations already in place in the international community.

To get you into the right frame of mind: it’s once again 2100 AD and hackers are living in mile-long space habitats in the Earth-Moon system. But from where do those hackers get their raw material, their hardware? The system abounds with space debris, defunct satellites from a century of technological progress. According to Earth maritime law, if space is to be treated like international waters then the right of salvage would permit them to take parts from any derelict. But is space like international waters? Or would hacking space debris result in doing hard time in the ice mines of Ceres?

Continue reading “Hack Space Debris At Your Peril” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger

June 27, 2016 by 54 Comments

We live in a connected world, but that world ends not far beyond the outermost cell phone tower. [John Grant] wants to be connected everywhere, even in regions where no mobile network is available, so he is building a solar powered, handheld satellite messenger: The MyComm – his entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The MyComm is a handheld touch-screen device, much like a smartphone, that connects to the Iridium satellite network to send and receive text messages. At the heart of his build, [John] uses a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium SatComm Module hooked up to a Teensy 3.1. The firmware is built upon a FreeRTOS port for proper task management. Project contributor [Jack] crafted an intuitive GUI that includes an on-screen keyboard to write, send and receive messages. A micro SD card stores all messages and contact list entries. Eventually, the system will be equipped with a solar cell, charging regulator and LiPo battery for worldwide, unconditional connectivity.

2016 will be an interesting year for the Iridium network since the first satellites for the improved (and backward-compatible) “Iridium NEXT” network are expected to launch soon. At times the 66 Iridium satellites currently covering the entire globe were considered a $5B heap of space junk due to deficiencies in reliability and security. Yet, it’s still there, with maker-friendly modems being available at $250 and pay-per-use rates of about 7 ct/kB (free downstream for SDR-Hackers). Enjoy the video of [Jack] explaining the MyComm user interface:

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger” →

Hackaday Dictionary: The Global Positioning System (GPS)

November 12, 2015 by 64 Comments

One of the fundamental technologies of modern gadgets is the Global Positioning System (GPS). Using signals from satellites orbiting the earth, a GPS receiver can pin down its location with remarkable accuracy: the latest generation of Civilian Navigation Signals (CNAV) sent by the US GPS system has an accuracy of less than half a meter (about 3 feet). These signals also contain the time, accurate to within milliseconds, which makes it perfect for off-line dataloggers and systems that require very accurate timing. That’s a powerful combination that has made GPS one of the main technologies behind the mobile revolution, because it lets gadgets know where (and when) they are.

Continue reading “Hackaday Dictionary: The Global Positioning System (GPS)” →