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Jon Oxer Talks About the ArduSats That are On the Way to ISS (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the they-sang-the-hit-song-'hitching-a-ride'-all-the-way-into-space dept.

Two ArduSats were launched last week from Japan, along with an ISS resupply package, and on August 9 this payload is due to arrive at the International Space Station. Jon Oxer is a co-founder of Freetronics, a company that sells Arduino-based products, so he has a vested interest in ArduSat's success. He's also a major Free Software booster, which may be part of the reason he was at OSCON -- where Timothy Lord and his camcorder caught up with him. BTW: This is the same JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) launch that is carrying the first talking humanoid robot to go into space from Earth. So this launch is not only "a giant leap for robots," as Japanese robot Mirata famously said, but is also a good-sized step for Arduinos. And for CubeSats, too.

1 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. Missed opportunity? by time961 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Arduinos make somewhat more sense than phonesats (Really? We're sending a touch-screen and graphics controller into low earth orbit? Because the boss couldn’t think of any sillier project and had a spare $100K for launch costs?).

    But it's hard to understand why a 17-wide parallel configuration of 8-bit microprocessors each having just 2.5KB of RAM makes for a sensible satellite payload processor. Why not something with an architecture more like a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard? Not those specific boards necessarily, but a similar, simple one-chip SoC approach and a decent amount of memory. A processor like that could drive a bunch of experiments (more than you can fit in a Cubesat), and have enough room for the software to be comfortable and maybe even maintainable on-orbit.

    A SoC-based system would fit in the same low cost profile but could run much more interesting applications. Ardusat feels like a missed opportunity, because it has lots of other things going for it: open source, submission process, international coalition, hobbyist/student focus, etc.