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Welcome Joris Aerts of Hiber!
- Joris introduced us to Maarten (CTO of Hiber), who we had on episode 427
- Chris had asked Joris about Starlink, but it will require “the pizza box”, which is a phased array modem that will track satellites to maintain connectivity as they pass overhead. That’s different than how the Hiber setup works.
- The Hiber team had a “theme song” as they were building the satellite: a polka
- Chris worked on a project in college (a cardboard box maze) that played “James Brown is dead” over and over.
- The Hiber satellite is a Cube Sat with 10x10x30 dimensions
- Brock Lameres talked about high reliablity lock-step processors on episode 497
- Old days was all rad hard
- Satellites these days are “new stuff but super redundant”. The main thing is making sure the box can gracefully reboot.
- Data has checksums to ensure integrity.
- They do statistical models on failed messages coming in and how likely they are to occur.
- Downlink not turned on right now
- Eccentric Orbits book
- Solar panels degrade over time, becuase they collect high energy particles. Those impact the dopants in the semiconductor.
- Lifetime expections of a satellite is about 4 years
- Their current satellite will be going up in early 2021 with SpaceX
- Shaun Meehan talked about watching some Planet Labs satellites blow up
- On The Contextual Electronics Podcast, Chris interviewed Joe Barnard about launching model rockets and some of the failures he has to recover from.
- The satellites orbit at 400 km above the earth
- Joris was surprised that working on satellites is effectively like any other type of engineering
- It has different constraints, compared to high volume applications
- Having golden backup is key in low volume applications
- They have a standard board form factor based on PC104
- “Pumpkin space PC104”
- Hiber is slowly moving away from that form factor, but there are benefits to using the standard.
- The main element Hiber makes is an SDR + Zynq, and then there is a different board with a Linux controller for the whole system
- Testing over CAN bus which Joris knew all about form his time working at Tesla
- Cost factor is really important in a high volume application
- Joris joined Tesla as an intern in 2011 and later joined full time
- He worked on the electronics for the very fancy door handles on the model S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thaX-h4oTTI
- LIN bus vs CAN bus
- LIN Bus is single master, with a 12V transceiver
- Working on a cable harness at an organizational level
- Versioning is challenging but everything can be updated
- Vertical integration helped with firmware deployment
- Joris is working on a new form factor for testing boards (Not yet named)
- Easy Phi
- NI PXI
- Link for satellite viz (Space Book)
Many thanks to our Patrons! You can join at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you’d like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite. |