"Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack, you score one of those orbiting satellites, man. You know, satellites they use to like, do cosmology, and look for oil and stuff?"
Are you competing this weekend? I put together a small team for qualifiers and had a blast with the CTF problems. We did well enough to get challenge coins but not to move on to finals.
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the hilarity of the domain name. For those who don't get it: it's a play on the name of the nyan-cat meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat
I remember hearing that Sum 41 (they're actually still around!) got sued for using Nyan Cat in a music video or something. Let's hope the author doesn't find this site haha
The PCB isn't really needed. It's just the ESP32 module and servo driver board (the one you can buy from Adafruit) combined on one PCB, the instructions show how to wire those up separately (I stared at the PCB for a few minutes trying to figure out what it had to do with hacking sats... It's just a motor driver/servo interface PCB).
They're easy and cheap to buy from arduino stores (or similar). The only part of their shopping list that I don't have in my general "unfinished projects" bin is the pan/tilt gimbal. I've built one manually before but it was a bit crappy.
It works smoothly for a smallish diagram like this, but that's as far as it goes. I attempted to create a 100% SVG music score editor and only realized my mistake after having put way too much work into it: working with large scores was sluggish to the point of making the whole thing useless. If you want snappy, I believe the best approach currently is to use a library that emulates the canvas API on WebGL (for example Pixi.js).
<title>Comparison of several satellite navigation system orbits</title>
<switch>
<desc systemLanguage="es">Comparación de las órbitas geoestacionaria, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo y BeiDou (satélites de órbita media), Estación Espacial Internacional, Telescopio Espacial Hubble, Constelación Iridium y órbita cementerio con los cinturones de radiación de Van Allen y el tamaño nominal de la tierra, ilustración de CMG Lee. Bitmap de la Tierra https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_pole_february_ice-pack_1978-2002.png by Geo Swan. La órbita de la Luna es cerca de 9 veces más grande (en radio y largo) que la órbita geoestacionaria. Esta animación se mueve a 1 hora por segundo. En el archivo SVG, se puede posicionar el mouse sobre una órbita o su nombre para resaltarla y hacer clic para ir a su respectivo articulo en la Wikipedia.</desc>
There was a recent story about free Vector Illustrations[1]. If I'm guessing it right, most of these SVGs are CSS animated, if not, it should be.
So, my business-partner, friend, and co-founder is like 10x better than me in design and front-end. Around 2012-13, he showed me how to animate some diagrammatic illustration with SVG and CSS. That was when I realized how brilliant it is to code animations and was thus highly scalable and responsive.
SVG is great, it's sort of a simplified iframe in an img element. It's great for implementing crispy animations that you don't want to have to fiddle with the DOM for.
I have always wanted to do something with satellites. Especially with SpaceX and global satellite internet coming. What can I do/learn? What will be valid in the next 5-10 years? I'm not sure where to start.
Cube sats are probably the most accessible way to get involved, other than getting a job where you get paid to work with satellites. "most accessible" is relative, high altitude balloons check a lot of the same boxes and don't require a sponsor to put you on-orbit
I wish there were a simple and easy way to connect to a satellite, at the same kind of level of effort as .. say .. connecting to a BBS in the 80's .. and access it, just like an 80's BBS - i.e. upload a message, wait for a response while the thing flies overhead/across the globe, etc.
I guess this project kind of achieves that in a way. If you can build the hardware you can access a very elite messaging system.
It just seems to me to be a great place to put a BBS. I wonder if there are satellites up there that have that kind of interface ..
As a matter of fact, there are several! FalconSat-3 is the one most people connect to in the USA. I think there might also be one aboard the ISS, but most people use the ISS for forwarding APRS packets.
You need an amateur radio license to connect to these, but once you have one you can get into all sorts of other radio projects around the world too :)
Edit: The downside, of course, is that you usually only have (at most) a 20-minute connection window before you lose line-of-sight, since these satellites are in LEO.
That is really nice to know, thanks for the info .. I'll have to find someone in my scene who can log onto falconsat, I'm sure I know a HAM or two who might at least pick up the flag and demo it one of these days ..
I'm surprised (but maybe I shouldn't be) that there's no mention at all of antennas. I guess it's a lot easier to get a signal from something in line of sight above you.
I hope they leave this up after DEFCON. It looks really easy to follow and I would like to get back into hacking on hardware when I got a bit more time.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] thread[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/nyansat-open-source-satellite-tr... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049836
Interested in watching the contest this weekend go down though. Tons of smart people doing interesting stuff.
> Satellites? Orbiting MY planet?
It's more likely than you think.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991947
It's a thing of beauty: https://nyan-sat.com/assets/licensed/orbital_comparison.svg
Be sure to view page source.
Edit: It also handles i18n for EN, FR and ES by displaying different titles and hyperlinks for different system languages. Jaw dropped.
SVG is insane
edit: like this:
This subtraction game is particularly interesting: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Subtract...
fgnegre jvaf, nyjnlf pubbfr crapvy orybatvat gb gur yrsg bs n zhygvcyr bs sbhe (jvgu crapvyf ahzorerq sebz bar gb gjragl bar)
(Decipher with https://rot13.com/)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_satellite_navi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2020-08-21
So, my business-partner, friend, and co-founder is like 10x better than me in design and front-end. Around 2012-13, he showed me how to animate some diagrammatic illustration with SVG and CSS. That was when I realized how brilliant it is to code animations and was thus highly scalable and responsive.
1. https://www.pixeltrue.com/free-illustrations
https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/
https://nyan-sat.com/chapter4.html
I guess this project kind of achieves that in a way. If you can build the hardware you can access a very elite messaging system.
It just seems to me to be a great place to put a BBS. I wonder if there are satellites up there that have that kind of interface ..
You need an amateur radio license to connect to these, but once you have one you can get into all sorts of other radio projects around the world too :)
Edit: The downside, of course, is that you usually only have (at most) a 20-minute connection window before you lose line-of-sight, since these satellites are in LEO.
https://www.amsat.org/falconsat-3/