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

Posted by Roblimo on Thursday August 8, 2013 @06:16AM 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.

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Skeptical about radiation performance by werepants · 2013-08-08 08:52 · Score: 3, Interesting

I really have to wonder if they've done any sort of radiation qualification on this thing. It isn't as though it will be running critical, multimillion dollar hardware or anything, but still, you're asking for trouble if you're putting rad-soft parts up there. At best you're going to have random bugs and suspect data from bit upsets, at worst you're going to brick your entire system when you get latchup or a functional interrupt that you aren't able to mitigate. Maybe they're tackling it with redundancy - I see that they have 17 Arduinos, so they can just shut one down if it degrades too much, but if your control hardware isn't rad-hard then it doesn't matter - weakest link and all that.

I have put an Arduino in space, btw, but only on a suborbital flight lasting about 20 minutes. Also, for what it's worth, IAAREE (I am a radiation effects engineer).