What started as a Nasa Space App Challenge now becomes an extraordinary opensource achievement on the top five finalist of hackaday.io.
What is SatNOGS in non technical words: imagine a cheap mobile openhardware ground station that can collaborate through the internet with other ground stations and gather satellite signals all together, participating in a holistic opensource/opendata and public accessible database/site !
If you are thinking, that cant be right, the answer is that it is!!!
The amazing team behind the SatNOGS is working around the clock - non stop ONLY with openhardware and free software to do exactly that !
A fully modular system (you can choose your own antennas! or base setup) you can review the entire code on github, you can see in high quality videos and guides for every step, every process, you can participate via comments, emails or even satellite signals !
3D Printing is one of the major component in their journey till now. The have already published every design they are using for the satnogs project on github! You just need to print them. Every non-3d printing hardware are available to every hardware store near by you. The members of this project have published the Arduino code and schematics for the electronics too !!
Everything is fully documented in details, everything is open source !
AMAZING!
It’s seems that i may be bias, so dont believe anything i am writing.
See for your self and be mind-blowing impressed with the quality of their hardware documentation
Visit their facebook account for news and contact them if you have a brilliant idea about satellites or you just want to get a status of their work.
How about the team ?
I’ve met the entire team at Athens Hackerspace and the first thing that came into my mind (and it is most impressive) is the diversity of the members itself.
Not only in age (most of them are university students, but older hobbyists are participating too) but also in the technical area of expertise. This team can easily solve every practical problem they can find in the process.
SatNOGS, as I’ve already mentioned, is fully active and that all started (with the bing bang of-course) with an idea: To reach and communicate with the Space (the final frontier). Satellites are sending signals 24/7 and the ground stations cant reach every satellite (i am not talking to geo-static satellites) and there is no one to acknowledge that. The problem that the satnogs is solving is real.
And i hope with this blog post, more people can understand how important is that this project scale to more hackerspaces around the globe.
To see more, just click here and you can monitor the entire process till now.