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Libre Space Foundation, Open Source Satellites and SatNOGS, Jo Hinchliffe (Wuthering Bytes 2019)

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The Libre Space Foundation aims to democratize access to space by making it feel closer and more accessible to everyone, moving away from the exclusive image of massive government facilities like NASA or ESA. A core principle of their work is operating in an open-source manner while deliberately avoiding traditional defense and warfare methodologies often associated with aerospace development. The foundation's journey began with a specific project called SatNOGS, which originated during the 2014 NASA Space Apps Challenge when a team from Hackspace Greece developed a low-cost ground station design to network together listening equipment globally. This initiative successfully won the Hackaday Prize in late 2014, providing the group with significant funding that allowed them to expand their operations and formally establish the Libre Space Foundation as an entity dedicated to these open-source space endeavors. Building on this foundation, the organization leveraged its growing network of ground stations across the globe to collect vast amounts of data from academic satellite missions that transmit openly into orbit. This collected information is stored in a publicly accessible database, providing researchers with significantly more data than they could gather independently. The community's growth was further catalyzed by their involvement in building and launching their own CubeSat named UPSAT as part of the QB50 mission. Although the project faced delays due to integration issues on the International Space Station, it ultimately succeeded thanks to a collaborative effort involving mechanical engineers, electronics experts, and global volunteers who contributed code and resources via open-source platforms like GitLab. Beyond satellite tracking, the Libre Space Foundation actively promotes amateur rocketry through scratch-built designs using entirely open-source tools for simulation and circuit design. Their influence expanded significantly after partnering with ESA at an Open Source CubeSat Workshop held in Darmstadt, which brought together a diverse international group ranging from hobbyists to high-level academics. This partnership established them as trusted collaborators within the European Space Agency's ecosystem, leading to further funding opportunities for agile teams working on software-defined radio applications and other space-related challenges that large industries might overlook. Additionally, they are currently exploring partnerships with institutions like Harvard and the Smithsonian to improve metadata standards for satellite data, ensuring better organization and accessibility of information from various sources. For individuals interested in joining this movement, setting up a ground station is presented as an achievable task rather than a complex engineering feat requiring specialized knowledge or expensive equipment. The process involves creating an account on their website, inputting location details obtained from Google Maps, selecting antenna types compatible with specific frequencies, and submitting the information to receive a dot on their global map. Once operational, these stations utilize open-source software like Gpredict to predict satellite passes, allowing users to schedule observations that automatically record audio or data packets when satellites fly overhead. The resulting data is stored in the public database where community members can build custom dashboards using tools like Grafana to visualize information, decode signals, and even share creative elements such as quotes from video games embedded within the data streams received from space.
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so i'm here to talk about a thing called libra space foundation and tell you the uh story of the libra space foundation and i'm gonna kind of tell you the story by talking about the projects that the libra space foundation delivers so just for now the libra space foundation the the kind of main aim of the libra space foundation is to make space uh seem a bit closer to everybody because we often think like spaces as ben sort of alluded to in his great talk this thing that happens at nasa esa in these massive buildings that we don't have access to and stuff like that and libra space really want to kind of democratize space and bring it closer to us and also critically they want to work in an open source way which i'm pretty sure most of the people in this room will have a mere inkling of what that might mean uh and also um they um sort of a bit political i guess in that they want to kind of develop space stuff but outside of the kind of war and defense kind of methodologies that that is the kind of classic way that the stuff seems to get developed in space so let's just do oh i should have said some stuff about me uh yes i'm joe i'm uh aaron's concrete dog i'm a freelancer um i have never ever grown up or made my mind up what i want to do in my life so currently at the moment i write for hackspace magazine i do a bit of work for these uh this lot and i uh i tinker with things i like machining things i make stuff i'm yeah one one of them and yeah there we go right so who's heard of satnags oh that's pretty good i've been i've been in rooms where that's just been like the tumbleweed comes across and stuff so satnogs is the first uh project of the libra space foundation and in fact it existed before the libra space foundation was even a thing and it came out of this thing called the nasa spacex challenge apologies to any american people in the room for that terrible accent um has anybody heard of nasa space apps no so nasa's oh yeah a couple of people so nasa space apps is like um nasa run this thing where they set up um uh hackathons and they all happen concurrently around the world on the same weekend so um they're there and in local individuals like so somebody in hebdon bridge from bridge rectifier could go we're going to run a space up challenge in hebdon bridge and they get in touch with the team and they get sent resources and materials and branding stuff and they can run their own kind of hackathon in line with all the others happening around the world on the same weekend and they pick themes so they sort of set some challenges for these these these hackathons and way back in their 20 the beginning of 2014 they had um a nasa space out challenger one of the themes was satellite communication so cut to greece and a hackspace called hackspace greece uh in athens they went really imaginative with the name i think and uh a bunch of people got together and uh formed the team as part of this nasa space app challenge and they basically came up with this and what it was was it was this idea of so you've got a satellite you've got a cubesat or you've got a pocket cube there's an amazing uh pocket cube builder in this very room in front of me so you've got these these these satellites these small satellites and they're zipping around the around the earth in low earth orbit maybe once every 90 minutes so they're traveling ridiculously quickly and you know you've a team has invested a load of time and money and has tried to make this thing that does something and returns some data from orbit and they want to be able to hear it so the thing you built to hear it is basically like a radio but we call it a ground station and um so lots of universities might build a mission and they build a ground station to try and hear their mission the trouble is is that these things are zipping past and they may only get like a couple of minutes whilst their their satellite is overhead and that might only happen a couple of times a week there may be great sways of time where there because of the position of the satellite and the position of the earth they can't listen to the satellite so the idea that we came up with all those years ago was well what if there was a sort of cheaper way to make ground stations but we could network them so as something went over a ground station in america it could kind of get picked up there but then when it dropped out of that one maybe somebody else's could kind of pick it up and take over and we could if we have a network that are all connected we can massively increase our coverage so um i love that photo this is this is uh my friend pierros and um this is one of the first ones that was built and this is on a rooftop in athens um which is sort of more romantic than set up a mountain in wales somehow but you know where i live but there we go and so this is pierros uh and and this is uh so one of the first iterations of the design so there's two antennas there's a box of goblins with some motors in it and basically you can you can tell it when a satellite and a satellite is going past that you're interested in and it will turn on a radio start recording but it will also track over um the sky and follow it so you get a really nice signal to your antennas as it passes over so that that's kind of uh and this was of course all open source and they were trying to reduce the cost and the complexity so that other people could do this as well because we wanted to build this network and then a brilliant thing happened we published it on hackaday and at the end of 2014 uh it won the hackaday prize and it was the best year ever to win the hackaday prize because it they gave an amazing prize which was one you had a choice actually we didn't take long to think about it you could either claim as winners one ticket for one person to go to space on a private launch whenever that in the future became available or you could take what they had worked out to be the cash equivalent of what that was worth at the time so being a load of space pirates we took the cash and it was a considerable amount of cash it was it was over if it was in uh great response it would be over i can't quite recall but it was something in the order of like 140 000 pounds or something like that so it was a it was a good lump of cash so we all had a mad crazy party we all know we didn't we didn't um so this th this happened and suddenly satnags this project that was just kind of largely confined to a few people around the world and and uh centered around this hackspace in greece kind of had a load of resources at its disposal so it was then that they kind of thought well there's loads of other things we could do to try and democratize space and to make it seem closer for people and we've got some cash now so we need to set something up so we became the libra space foundation of which satnoggs is a um is one of the projects we cut to a couple of years later this is i love this image that somebody made somebody in our community made this is a just a montage a collage of of lots and lots of our ground stations around the world it's not all of them by any means it's just a a collection that was stacked you can see people have done all kinds of designs and we have ones for different frequencies and some of them have ones that move and some of them have simpler ones that don't move and then it's really started to grow and grow and grow we have this this enormous network around the world and this is a little bit out of date now but this just shows this is if you went to our satnog's website uh this is the sort of landing page and it shows you this map sometimes takes a bit of time to load and that causes us more problems than some of the really clever space stuff if we're honest um but yeah you'll you'll see there's uh lots and lots and lots of ground stations um or all over the planet and but we do have some areas so if anybody knows anybody in sort of up here in northern canada africa as well we haven't made we have actually just off this picture we've got a couple down here but yeah any any contacted areas that have no uh no coverage there we'd love to talk to you so um locally this is where i live it's a bit of a weird website let you publish exactly where your house is on it if you have a ground station in your garden so i was very proud to be the first person in north wales uh to have a little ground station in my garden and um it's interesting that you you only need to sort of be the seed sometimes with with things like this in our communities that if you're the first one in the loo area and you're hoisting up a great thing or you've actually i'll show you later sent your your 12 year old daughter up a ladder to fix a big antenna onto a pole um your neighbors what's happening what are you doing there and then they glaze over slightly to say oh it's a space ground station thing that i just do as a hobby and oh okay um but it it it is true that uh once you start doing stuff um you can usually locally other people will follow so back to the libra space foundation so what other projects do we do we'll come back to the satnox thing in a bit because i'd like to show you a little bit more under the hood of how a few little bits work um so the libra space foundation we have this money we have this network of satellite ground stations that listen to all manner of satellites that are up there lots of academic missions transmit their data openly and they love us because they get back so all the data that we collect goes off into a publicly accessible open source database so the academics alike you return 100 times more data than we could get have got on our own so we we solve a lot of problems for people and um yeah so and we've got this ground station network you can listen to all this stuff what's next so an opportunity arose it fell into our lap actually um that we got the opportunity to build and fly our own cubesat so our own satellite so it kind of makes sense doesn't it we've got all this listening gear at our disposal let's build a satellite and put it up there so um we can we can you know we can sort of complete the loop almost so this is a satellite that um that was built and flew and it's called upsat or upsat or if you're one of my colleagues from greece they pronounce it oopsat which i think is just the oops it's just brilliant um so it's a sort of two and a half unit cubesat so it's about this big and yeah it was it was interesting because it was part of this bigger mission called qb50 which this organization basically wanted 50 of this certain type of radiation sensor to be flown in low earth orbit and what they did instead of just building 50 of their own cubesats and chucking them up they sort of put it out to tender and said anybody can build one of the ships so long as it interfaces this sensor sends the data back in this way and you know we welcome applications so i won't mention who it is but an organization applied and were accepted to build one and they had um they had around uh i think it was just short of three years to realize this project six months from the end of this when you're supposed to be sort of putting it in a box and and very carefully and posting it to the people and they got in touch with us at libra space and said we haven't built it it's all gone wrong it's been a bit difficult really we sort of bit off more than we can chew um can you help us so we said okay well we've got some mechanical engineers involved in our group and we've got a lot of electronics engineers let's look at what what you've got this sort of small sort of sketchbook of not not very complete ideas came across and so um it was quickly apparent that they they didn't have very much and so we actually said to look we'd love to be involved in this and but i don't think we can we can do it together i think the the only way we could kind of do this is if we took the project and kind of chucked our hacker ethic at it yeah so we had six months we got this this gig to build and launch a satellite and we we started from nothing so we literally opened a well it was a github then it's on gitlab now we opened the repo with nothing in it you know readme um build bill's hotelite submits commits so yeah so six months have been said but we did have some money because we had this cash from the hackaday prize so we paid some of our kind of real key contributors who were available to give some time so we started paying some of them to work on it and also we leveraged the community there were loads of people around the world just chucking little bits of work into this a couple of hours here a couple of hours there but there was a core sort of in in in greece and around europe that were living this there are people who still twitch when you talk about the upsat development but six months later well four months later away it went and it was deployed and we we delivered on time and um the way that this one got launched was through a company that i think ben mentioned in his it was called it's called nano racks and it you know it's really i mean it is quite technical but it is essentially a jack in the box on the international space station on a robot arm and so um it goes up on a rocket they unpack it they stick it in the international space station you go on a jobs list and eventually they get down the jobs list they unpack your thing check all the things you've said remember to plug that in and pull that out and do this they put it in this jack in a box and then at a very precise time and precise direction they they push it out and um yeah so that's kind of the story so it went up on this rocket so this is uh an atlas v with a cygnus um resupply mission so i like to tell my kids that it went up and it was wrapped up in like the astronauts pants and clean clothes and all that kind of stuff just you know because that's what children are for just to make nonsense up and let them believe it um so yeah and so uh but unfortunately it was delayed massively delayed massively it was integrated packed in all put in position and then it took about another i think it was supposed to launch in like three months time but it took six months which that you know we've all stopped this crazy period of work and we're like oh my god did i did i plug that battery in did when i soldered that when i was drunk was that a good idea like i don't know so it's a nerve-wracking time and then it got to the international space station and then it sat there for ages and that was utterly heartbreaking and depressing and very difficult but i've got a tip for you okay so if you ever end up with a satellite on the international space station that you're waiting to get deployed by the astronauts on the international space station the best thing you can do with your time is get on twitter and talk to the astronauts on the international space station and blag them and say when it launches please please please would you take some photographs of our satellite being launched and they get eventually go oh if you just shut up we'll do it so the next slide and i really hope it works because sometimes it doesn't but it should work cause it's on my computer is it is a little uh animation made up of about um 12 frames so what you're about to see is our little tiny satellite up sat at the back of three satellites getting chucked out into space off the international space station we're at the back and that is literally we annoyed an astronaut on the international space station oh god it's that day i'd better go in the coupler with my camera and take some photographs yeah so there we go so yeah so we built that what else do we do we do loads of other things we've got a whole set of repos that are um so i'm really interested in amateur hyper rocketry i think it's a great stem activity and it's i mean it you know rockets we saw in ben's thing rockets just evoke a great sort of feeling of excitement i feel and uh so we have a lot of stuff we've got some repros around uh open source avionics stuff to measure you know pressure height and to deploy different aspects of explosive charges that you use to break high power rocketry stuff apart and so we've got all that's an ongoing project that we've we've got and uh one of my next speaking engagements after this is i'm going out to a thing called the open source cubesat workshop which is travels around each year and this year it's actually out in greece and i'm going to be hosting a roundtable discussion with people from all over the world hopefully if they come because it's an optional roundtable um about how how can we develop like a global open source um rocketry road map i don't even know if it's worth doing i don't i don't know the answers at all but i want to have that discussion because we see things like i don't know if you've heard of copenhagen suborbitals who are trying to build an amateur crude and not crude as in uh it will have crew on it not crude as in like war crude um they've they've got a crude um uh suborbital uh mission that they're trying to build as an amateur group and we've and you know we've got all these interesting things but what we haven't got is a is a truly open source kind of um approach to to rocketry so i do a lot of open source orchestra this is a picture of one of my rockets it's not quite as impressive now after ben's talk is it but you know in real life that's about this big um and uh the thing i love is um i love um completely scratch building rockets so everything on this is scratch built apart from the motor because as a member of the uk rocketry council i have to inform you it's actually illegal to make solid rocket propellants in the uk as an amateur and but everything else so the parachutes that it kicks out every everything i make because i'm that kind of um well some would say idiot really i'm that kind of idiot because it's you know what better use of my time than to stay up to three in the morning sewing a small cross-form parachute on a on a sewing machine that i've laboriously done all the maths on well i could just buy one for 17.99 but you know um yeah and and i love talking about rockets i love kind of publishing stuff so again um if you find me concrete dog or your fan of libra space uh stuff there's open repositories with with rocket designs in and and also not just uh it's not just an open design we tend to use open source toolpaths for everything so like if you're looking at one of my rocket repros the design simulation and flight simulations and stuff are all done in open rocket which is a free open source little application for for designing rockets um you know all our all our electronic stuff is done in a uh key cad which of course we send to uh osh park the finest uh pcb fabricator is on the front row i've got to say that you'll get me um so yeah so uh it's all up there and then what else does libra space do so and this was a really pivotal move for us at libra space this is a picture at the end of the first open source cubesat workshop which i uh mentioned earlier this was held out at um oh where was it held darmstadt so they have um what's the damage that one esoc yeah so it's the sort of um they do all the command and control stuff of stuff that's actually in space and orbiting mars and all that kind of stuff there and that's where all the data comes back to for the european space agency and they've got a big kind of conference suite there and so we we partnered with esa and to deliver this open source cubesat workshop um and it brought people from from all over the world we had people from like uh these two gentlemen from jaxa from the japanese space agency people from uh i remember this young lady was from canada you know like it was a truly sort of global meetup and it was interesting because it was one of the first things that east has done that wasn't just industry it had people like me there going hello i build rockets in my shed in north wales through to you know like like sort of high-end academics and all kinds of different people and the really interesting thing about it was oh well there's two two uh things that i found interesting one is that i got to talk and that is just terrifying sadly i mean it's terrifying speaking in front of anybody but going on a stage at issa and just feeling like the least eminent person ever in front of this room and then somebody just before i went on this guy who's a french guy who works for ezra called red red one came up to anyone you know they they stream this to uh the issa um television channel i've just checked we have uh we have like seventeen thousand people watching and then he handed me the microphone hello yeah terrifying um so uh yeah but the the brilliant thing for uh the interesting thing for libra space was that um we became uh a sort of known um a known partner who could work with issa so from this very simple thing of a workshop partnering on a workshop that we wanted to deliver together it just meant that we were on their radar on their systems as a partner that can be involved financially with the european space agency so since then we've we've built on that uh relationship and we've we've actually um started to receive quite a bit of funding for different projects from the european space agency which is just mad when you think you know it's a group of hackers uh in a greek basement and now it's like oh yeah they've given us some money from the european space agency so this for example is one of the projects that that we're uh involved in and we're delivering so esa gave us a chunk of money to basically address a load of things that they want developing to do with space applications for software defined radios and they realized that perhaps some of these little problems that they had weren't ever going to get solved in like big industry and it actually perhaps needed kind of small little kind of agile kind of groups to go oh yeah we're really good at that and we'd love to do it we've got the passion for that we'll take that on and this funding that the libra space have allows us to give a little bit of funding it's geographically uh sort of um boxed into europe so what happens in a couple of months don't know but there we go but it means and that we can we can give groups little bits of funding from us and sort of subcontract stuff from esa by us to allow people to to deliver these workloads that we we manage and and when the repos are full of all the stuff that solves it to esa to our satisfaction we can send them into to esa and fulfill our kind of obligations with them so it's a fantastic opportunity there's lots of little businesses and teams all around europe working on some of this stuff um oh actually i thought i had another slide there outrageous and we've also so i'll do it off cough we've got um we've just done a bit of partnership was just starting a really innovative bit of partnership work with um the center center for astrophysics harvard and smithsonian which is a libra the library of the of the astrophysics department and they've got this thing that they want to do about um how metadata of all this data that comes from satellites kind of gets um logged and what the sort of schema that what the metadata looks like and so things like that we're starting to sort of broaden our kind of wings into into other things and it's largely because we have this big resource of data we've got so much data from from satnags that it's a really useful tool for other academic sort of people to to throw work out and develop so back to satnags um how am i doing on time i'm all right i think yeah yeah i i wanted to just give you because loads of people hear me waffle on at great length and you're doing very well none of you have fallen asleep yet i don't think but and lots of people think oh it must be incredibly complex having a ground station in your garden and blah blah and if there's one thing i want to leave you with today is that it's dead simple if people like me can do it anybody can so it's all on a website so if you've liked logged in you know if you've signed up for facebook or something you're you can pretty much do the website stuff because it's dead easy so basically you log in and you create an account so this is me that's my amateur radio call sign you don't need one of those there are there are stations on there that have like lovely names of le where they are there are other ones that people have just put jeff's station you know you can call them whatever you like and and basically you set up an account and then you can set up a station and you put in some details that you get off google maps about your your location you work out how high you are and you work out kind of um what's the minimum horizon so that means if you're between two buildings your horizon is going to be a higher number because you can't see as much of the sky if you live halfway up a mountain you don't know what to put so you just put in 10 because on one side i get nothing but on the other side i get everything so that's all that is you put in some details about the type of uh aerial that you have which um means which frequencies you're you're available to listen to and you kind of click submit and you get a little dot on the map and on the website once your station's up and running and um the if i scroll down from from where we were before this is what i would see so it automatically uses loads and loads of open source software it uses things like g predicts and loads of new radio modules and all this kind of stuff and it pulls together um a three day long list that continually updates so you can get three days worth of these into the future and what these are are these are past predictions of things that are going to go over your station so wherever your station is is sort of represented in the middle here and each one of these is a satellite that's going over here it's making this journey between these times on on that particular date and nobody we track thousands and thousands and thousands of of satellites so nobody remembers what what all of these are i know what that one is because it says iss so there's a good chance that's the international space station i i've maybe been into it long enough that i know what a few others are but i i totally don't know so we've made it that if you click on one of these you get a nice pop-up and that tells you a little bit about um the satellite and that's going past so this is a an amateur radio satellite and called fox 1b and it gives you some sort of the success rate of people hearing it when they've made an observation and and some of the details about it so it's you know it's all pretty kind of usable so if you think oh yes that's good it's going in my house i'm interested in that you would then click the schedule button and you simply get a little check check box really gives you the same information it shows you sort of on a timeline where it's going to be some of the satellites have different transmitters that transmit on different frequencies or do different bands or do different data on different transmitters so you might get a drop down selection here that you select what you want to listen to when you're all ready you click schedule click schedule the observation was successfully scheduled you'll get this page that should unless you click the big delete button in the corner this should just exist forever and and basically it's got some details about your station and what the uh what the observation is of and then it's empty because it's not done the observation yet it's going to happen in the future so you've got a waterfall tab an audio tab and a data tab so when you come back after the allotted time if everything's gone well the the the doohickey in the box in your garden has turned on it's recorded some audio it sent it to the web the web it's been stored and it produces a an image of the the audio of course then you can click the audio tab and you may get um you'll get an audio wave of the um the the recording with the data in it if that's uh some sort of data when you click play it may sound like a you know a zx spectrum uh loading a game [Music] and for the bpsk fans that was a secret message for you all um so um but but also we do have some observations that are um audio so for example we i'm gonna play in a little bit i've got some clips of audio uh listening to the astronauts on the international space station so it could be audio and then uh you might click the data one so the data might just be you know frames of data that don't really really do much but it might be what's my next slide actually before i give the game away i know um so there might be frames of data and then all those frames of data get stored on the satnox database which is again this open public database that anybody can go into and use um [Music] sometimes data might be images and it might be decoded here but the other thing that lots of our members of our community are really into at the moment is we um we we send all this stuff into our database and then members of the community pick a satellite that they're interested in and they build a um they build a dashboard usually using a tool called grafana if any of you are interested in that kind of stuff it's quite a popular tool at the moment and they'll build a dashboard that nicely displays the stuff that's in the data it will decode it if they've shared those details from the mission of how to decode it and they'll decode it and stuff so the next one i'm going to show you is a nice one this is the university of texas launched a cubesat that they called armadillo apparently you have to say it like that they told us on twitter um so uh the the this is sort of there's other stuff on the dashboard that's maybe more sexy but it's got some stuff about times and frames and it's got some uh stuff about the frame count and stuff but the thing that they did you can't really see this but the thing that they did which has kind of really excited some some amateur radio people is at the end of every data package they've put um a quote from the game portal 2 in so so this this this dashboard we've built just comes up with quotes from portal 2 which which just continually populate these random silly lies like there's one that just goes whatever it's like brilliant uh what is this one the situation is hopeless oh there's one that yeah just repeats don't like space don't like space and they're all quotes from portal 2. but the interesting thing about that is that it really energizes the community because they're like it's not just a load of dry data coming back they're like oh i've got to schedule that observation because what's in it tonight or this week or whatever um the other thing that we get is we do um a lot of the weather satellite images are open and available for anybody to have and there's this beautiful thing this beautiful thing that you can do right so you can work out when there's going to be a really nice um weather image over your area of the world so like for me it would be whales in the uk and you know some of europe and i and you can work out that sometimes that everything aligns sounds like i'm going to be a bit cosmic now but everything aligns that you've got an observation coming over just as the sun is rising and you're going to be able to get like a dawn image of above where you live and it'll show all the mountains in shadow and stuff so i this happened once for me and i was like oh this is going to be amazing i'm going to get like you know all like we have to see the pyrenees maybe in the alps and there'll be shadows and then there'll be the uk and there'll be whales and of course it was cloudy totally cloudy but there we go so yeah but we get lots and lots and lots of different types of data including there's this brilliant program run by amateur radio enthusiasts around the world called aris which enables school children to talk via amateur radio to the international space station and we um regularly record the side that comes back from the international space station and then we we link it back to aries so that they have a record of the conversations so these are all taken the next two clips are two short audio clips you've got to remember this audio has come from space and been picked up by an antenna in my welsh garden so it's not the best of audio quality but it's not too bad and uh the first one i believe is a gentleman on the international space station called scott tingle that's a name isn't it and and he's talking about his ride up uh um [Laughter] [Music] can you imagine being a like a 12 year old 13 year old at high school and you know people turning up setting up all these aerials and then like chatting to elections like yeah and then we're after the races i just think that's that's a really cool project the next one is dehydrated chili so that's great also we have food from different countries so we can share uh between the russian food the american food canadian italian european french japanese so that's great that's for the kind what we live on a gmt the time of london that's an obituary decision it's halfway between houston time and muscle time so we eat our meals on that time so now here on board it's about 9am i've had breakfast a couple hours ago and i'll have lunch uh it sounds rather pleasant doesn't it cuisine of the world yeah so there we go we're getting to the end there but i just wanted to chuck a couple of slides in there i showed this picture earlier of this big moving tracking one and lots and lots of people in our community do build these but a more common entry point is for people to build a static one so i wanted to just show you that what i have in my garden there we go um it's a rare day oh my all the greek team didn't believe that this was my ground station because there was blue sky in it the greeks the greeks in our team just think it's gray here continually so yeah and this is my ground station wells it's on a scaffolding pole or what quite a long scaffolding pole that i've cemented into the garden i know my partner loves me um and it has a small waterproof box and then this is actually a commercial antenna but you can lots of people make it even cheaper by building um antennas themselves and this uh as i told you my my daughter i think it's essential that uh young women have ladder skills i don't know where that's quite come from but i just felt it was very important and saren my daughter loves it she loves girly up and tinkering and she loves listening to the stuff that's uh that's coming back from it and looking at the data so it's um it's nice that it's become a family thing even though my partner again is like why is she up a big ladder um but in the box there's nothing too too exciting um it's uh this is sort of uh the the equivalent kit but on the desk so there's a waterproof box there's a raspberry pi which needs an sd card with a special image that we've got on our on our um uh satmos website there's a couple of clamps to put it on the pole some cables we do a thing called power over ethernet which means that it gets its power and its internet connection through one cable so you only have to drill one hole in your gable end and uh yeah as i say this is a commercial uh antenna that um we use usually when well either if you've got the bully or if you're building one to install in somewhere else it's just a quicker way to do it but lots of people build these with like home built antennas built out of all kinds of cheap and findable materials and so yeah that's that's just that's kind of it you need an internet connection and some some stuff that i i would guess quite a few of you probably have in your homes or layers already so uh yeah that's me um i write for hackspace magazine and there's a massive um feature on libra space foundation that you can get in issue 18 of hackspace magazine which you can download for free or all the hackspace magazines uh come out this uh download every article there's only 22 issues so far and i hope they continue um but they're all worth reading but issue 18 has got a load of stuff about space and the libra space that's my email find me on twitter somebody else has got concrete dog with an o so you have to put a zero in that's me thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you