Daily Archives: 1/3/2012

Building a distributed satellite ground station network (or not…)

My twitter intro says that I am an “enthusiast for enthusiasm”. When I wrote that, it was simply because there are some questions that I really think aren’t helpful at all. Questions like:

  • Why didn’t you just buy X instead of building your own?
  • Didn’t somebody do that years ago? Why are you playing with that old technology?
  • Why are you writing a program to do that, when you could just use Y, some program/framework/application that I use.

I hate questions like this because they aren’t really questions at all: they are simply trying to tell you that what you are doing is stupid or pointless. Here’s the thing: I mostly understand why I do the projects that I do, and I’m perfectly okay with you not understanding my rationale, or agreeing with it even if you do understand. The proper answer is “why climb a mountain?” isn’t “because it was there”. It’s not even “because no one has before”. The proper answer is “because I’ve not done it, and I enjoy mountain climbing.” Interestingly, most people won’t try to convince you that you shouldn’t like mountain climbing, but all sorts of people will try to tell you that your technical projects are a waste of time. This kind of conversation actually irritates me.

And with all this introduction, I’m going to now criticize a project, which is going to seem a bit hypocritical. Hang with me to the end, and I’ll try to resolve the apparent hypocrisy, at least partially.

The topic is the plethora of news stories about a talk given at the Chaos Communication Congress (28c3) recently held in Berlin. Some links to news stories:

Hackers aim to launch Internet satellite network, moon mission
Hacker satellite grid to counter Internet censorship??
Hackers Plan Satellite Network to Fight Internet Censorship

So, what’s my beef? After all, any reader to this blog knows that I’m interested in amateur satellite and communications, surely this is right up my alley?

And indeed it is. But the motivation is just… well… it’s stupid. Not stupid because fighting censorship is a bad idea: it’s a very, very good idea. Even essential. But the idea that satellites constructed by amateurs can play any role (much less any significant role) in fighting censorship is fantasy.

First of all, launching satellites is expensive. Really expensive. While the hardware of cubesats can be constructed quite economically, launches have costs which are multiples of ten thousand dollars, for masses which are less than 1kg launched into low earth orbit. Currently AMSAT has a project called FOX to develop a communication satellite that fits the cubesat form factor, but it’s capacity and power are very limited, mostly by the physical size and weight limitations imposed by available launch opportunities. To launch a satellite into MEO or HEO would require costs measured in the millions of dollars.

Secondly, you can’t get spectrum to operate a satellite network like they imagine. Amateur radio frequencies are subject to regulation and treaties just like any other spectrum, and the uses of such frequency are dictated by regulation and treaty. The governing international body is the IARU (the International Amateur Radio Union) and member nations enact local regulations to enforce treaty restrictions to comply with the regulations of the IARU. The purpose of amateur radio satellites must be to “(1) provide communication for the general amateur radio community and/or (2) self training and technical investigations relating to radio technique”. While these topics are fairly broad, they are not broad enough to provide a general replacement for the Internet. In fact, in the U.S. amateur radio is specifically prohibited from carrying “communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services.” You can’t get the frequency allocations. Nobody will launch a satellite without frequency coordination.

Third, if your concern is to bypass the censorship of governments, it seems odd to do it by launching a satellite, because governments tend to have very strict and tight controls over satellites and satellite technology. For instance, in the U.S. ITAR regulations essential prohibit the transfer of dual use technologies to other countries, even to our allies. This isn’t just a theoretical concern: American participation in the amateur satellite projects of other countries have been significantly stifled But even more basic than these issues are the fact that access to space is currently under the control of the very governments we are concerned about. While increasing commercialization is eroding that to a certain degree, we cannot rely on commercial entities to operate in defiance of the governments of the countries in which they operate. There is some possibility that an organization such as Copenhagen Suborbitals might be able provide launches, but these operations must operate within the regulations of the countries from which they operate as well, so I think the idea of access to space independent of governmental interference is a fantasy.

Here’s the bottom line though: if your goal is to prevent government censorship, every dollar that you spend could do orders of magnitude more benefit using more conventional earth-bound technology. Funding projects like the FreedomBox Foundation, HTTPS Anywhere or The Tor Project, or working to generate a mesh based Wifi capability in your area are much, much stronger ways to work to combat Internet censorship.

If you want to build satellites, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But to try to sell the idea by saying that it provides a way to combat Internet censorship? That’s misleading at best.

Addendum: Here’s the actual talk at the Chaos Communication Conference. It’s actually got some cute stuff in it, mostly because it leaves behind the fantasy that a satellite communication network will provide a hedge against censorship in the first five minutes.

Lunch with Ken Boak, the Nanode, and the evolution of the Arduino platform

Today, through a bit of serendipity involving twitter and the web, I managed to have lunch with Nanode designer Ken Boak, who happened to be on an unrelated visit to the Bay Area this week. We exchanged brief messages for the first time a couple of weeks ago, as I was intrigued with his idea of making a version of BASIC that ran on the Arduino/Nanode. He was kind enough to leave me with a couple of his latest version to experiment with. Compared to the v5 version that I got as a gift (purchased from wickeddevice.com) and assembled last week, these have a few cool new additions:

  • The screw terminals have been removed, and a small wireless module put in their place.
  • The board has a 32K static SRAM for storage.
  • It has a micro SD card slot on the bottom for long term storage.
  • It has a real time clock on the bottom.

Pretty darned cool! The new version seems better to me in every way., and I thank Ken for dropping some of them off for me (and also for a couple of coworkers who are interested in Arduino programming). I’ll be working to use them in a future project for sure, and if you are interested in having a highly interconnected Arduino compatible board to play with at a reasonable cost, I can recommend the Nanode (although I’d wait until Wicked Device starts carrying the new variety, the old V5 design lacks some of these cool features).

I see the Nanode as a cool evolution of the basic Arduino platform. The Arduino does a lot right, but there are a few things that bother me.

  • Cost.. Yeah, they are cheap. But let’s face it, they aren’t that cheap. The Uno (around $30) is just an ATmega328 (about $2 in quantity), an ATmega16u2 (again about $2) to provide USB, and then a handful of discrete components. You get a bunch of pins broken out, but no actual peripherals or connectors. No switches. No (or maybe one) LED. No additional memory or RTC. No SD card socket. My rather silly Arduino n’ Gameduino Satellite Tracker costs nearly $100 in parts, which makes the entire project less interesting, because it could be done as cheaply with more capable technology. The Nanode makes it a bit more tractable: it has a real time clock, and can even do NTP to set the time and fetch new elements over Ethernet. Thus, I think the nanode gives you some added value.
  • Flexibility in development environment. When I first started with the Arduino, it bothered me a little that I needed a sixty megabyte download of a programming environment to program this little controller with maybe just 16K of memory. Even if you just wanted to blink an LED, you had to compile and reflash code. Back in the days of my youth, we didn’t have the benefit of cool optimizing compilers, but we DID have the benefit of cool interactive programming environments. Ken’s idea of creating a Tiny BASIC programming environment brings some of that back. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but for simple experiments and education, the interactivity is useful. The technology that enables this for the Nanode is the inclusion of a 32K serial SRAM: we can store programs in this RAM and interpret code directly out of them.
  • Cheap, flexible peripherals. I have some Xbees to play with, but they are a bit spendy really. An Xbee costs about $22 or so last I checked, and to interface them with an Uno, you’ll need another shield which costs around $20 by itself. Tacking $45 onto a $30 board just to get wireless seems excessive. Ditto for Ethernet: the Ethernet Shield costs around $30-$40 (or even more) and basically doubles the cost of the Arduino. The Nanode includes Ethernet (using the rather inexpensive and easy to get ENC28J60 by Microchip) and uses some small and inexpensive RF modules. While these modules are perhaps not as capable as a full Xbee implementation, their cost and benefits are much lower, and their standard deployment on the Nanode board makes them convenient to use.
  • Compatibility with both shields and breadboards. Let’s face it: the Arduino Shield form factor is idiotic. Had the pins been laid out on a 0.1″ grid, you could have made shields with just ordinary 0.1″ proto board. Or, you could put pins on the bottom, and plug it directly into a standard solderless breadboard. The original design was a mistake. Let’s get over it, shall we? The Nanode does a good interim compromise: you can put headers in either position, which is awesome. But shields are already a bit of a compatibility nightmare: depending on what pins your shield uses and/or what voltages, it already may not work with a variety of seemingly compatible Arduino variants. The Nanode also wins on this case, because many of the most common shields that you would add are simply not necessary on the Nanode.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that the Nanode will kill the market for other Arduino variants and form factors. In fact, I don’t think that it should: I like the fact that I can get Arduino Nanos, Arduino Pros, and Arduino Megas, but program them all from the same environment. But I think that peripheral additions that the Nanode provides gives added value, and if the Arduino is to compete in a world where things like the Raspberry Pi exist, I think we need to figure out how to add some additional value to the Arduino platform. I thank Ken and the other Nanode users for thinking about this stuff, and taking Arduino evolution in an interesting direction.