I first became fired up and interested in Cubesats after watching this talk by Hojun Song, who (fingerscrossed) will launch his open source satellite this April.
I then loooked into cubesats a little and downloaded and read the official cubesat specification document as laid out by the originators of the cubesat platform Cal Poly. The design specification document is available here After looking at this I was hooked and on wider reading around the cubesat developers documents I found this quote attributed to cubesat project inventor Dr Robert Twiggs
“I hope the CubeSat is like the personal computer....you don't know what the heck you're going to do with this little box when you build it or what markets will be enabled. But it's so cool, you've got to do it.”
That go me very excited!
So there are cubesats already in low earth orbits in space that have been built pretty much entirely from components (chassis kits, radios, cpu's etc etc) that can be bought "off the shelf" and there's a large number of companies building components. This is still pretty expensive but what interested me was that it is theoretically possible to fabricate your own chassis, develop your own pcb's etc and essentially scratchbuild a satellite!....So here we are...I plan to regularly post anything relevant to cubesats and also anything relating to DIY/amateur space. As for this first post I'll show my (DODGY) work so far...(click on images to make them bigger)
Scrap aluminium from a tv aerial made into a 10 x 10 x 10 cm cube just to get an idea of the size. Also my raspberry pi is inside it just for kicks...not sure the rpi is a good choice for a cubesat control system as it's pretty power hungry
Recently though I've been learning sketchup and designing an easy(ish) to home fabricate cubesat chassis. To fabricate this chassis will require some machining/milling which is a skill area I hope to develop over the next few months..I am currently aquiring the tooling to hopefully be able to have a crack at this. Lots of people CNC/mill there chassis out of a whole aluminium block (often referred to as a monoblock chassis) which is great in terms of creating a rugged rigid chassis, but if a large change of design is needed a monobloc chassis requires complete refabrication. My design would allow for different designs of crossmembers to be tried out whilst retaining the rails through revisions.
Anyway I shall continue to post my ramblings and thoughts about diy space stuff, I'll be glad to recieve any comments and thoughts people may have. You can also follow me on twitter @dogsat
