While banging on about NASA and the astronauts (yes, plural, there were four) we saw at Space Center Houston a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of this space-themed project closer to Pi Towers. Engineering students at Harlow College in Essex, UK have designed a CubeSat platform to take their homemade hardware to space.
This is AuroraSat: Canadian CubeSat Project looking glorious
The Raspberry Pi Pico-based build will be taking photos of Earth and beaming them back to the students’ classroom in Essex. For our international readers, Essex is one of Cambridgeshire’s neighbouring counties, and less than an hour’s drive from Pi Towers.
How are they making the CubeSat?
The student engineers created three boards, all designed around Raspberry Pi Pico:
- Master controller board: carries an Adafruit RFM69W radio transceiver breakout board
- Ground station: carries the same Adafruit breakout board, as well as decoder software to parse images taken on the CubeSat platform for viewers back on Earth
- Acquisition board: features an Arducam to take high-resolution photos, an Adafruit SD card breakout board to store those photos, and several sensors from Adafruit and Pimoroni
The team wrote all the software running on the three boards in MicroPython and CircuitPython. They did the board designs in EasyEDA, an online PCB design tool and circuit simulator.
They’re hoping to test their hardware first on a quadcopter, then see if it can stand up to the dizzying heights reached by a high altitude weather balloon, before setting their sights on space.
Extracurricular
This project already sounds impressive, but more impressive still is that the student design team has achieved it all inside two hours per week alongside their core studies. Harlow College teachers and STEM ambassadors have been running weekly enrichment sessions alongside local experts to help students experience real applications of the technology they’re learning about.
We were extra pleased to hear that the training kits used during these weekly sessions were built for the college using materials provided by our friends Pimoroni and Monk Makes — both excellent UK-based purveyors of the finest tech goods.
