Kickstarter

Hi Everyone,

Sorry it has taken me way too long to post about this (busy as usual). Maker Faire was a huge success. There was a ton of interest in KickSat. So many people came by the booth that I barely had time to walk around the rest of the fair. Here's the team in front of the booth:

KickSat also won an editor's choice award! Check out our shiny blue ribbon:

Thanks to all of the backers who stopped by the booth - it was great to meet so many of you in person.

Back in the lab, we're busy building flight hardware. Our launch has slipped by a few more weeks and is now officially set for December 9, 2013. That gives us a little more breathing room in our schedule, with KickSat's delivery date now pushed to early September. As always, you can keep an eye on our ever-changing launch date on Spaceflight Now.

Thanks again for all of your support!

- Zac

Hi Everyone,

We've continued making great progress over the last couple of weeks. We reached a big milestone this week when we sent the structure and parts of the deployer for KickSat to a machine shop to be made out of aluminum. These are the first components we've made that will be part of the actual flight unit that will launch in the fall. I'll be sure to post pictures when we get the finished parts.

For those who are interested in setting up a ground station to receive signals from the Sprites, I've just finished an install script for Ubuntu and similar flavors of Linux that should make installing GNURadio as painless as possible. Instructions are on the KickSat wiki. I'll be putting together a more complete how-to guide with information on antennas and LNAs soon as well.

Lastly, this weekend is Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area. We'll be exhibiting, along with a bunch of other very cool space projects, at the NASA booth. If you're in the area, stop by to check out our latest hardware as well as a working KickSat ground station.

That's it for this week. Hope to see some of you at Maker Faire!

- Zac

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share our latest Sprite design which we've been testing this week.

We've swapped our old crystal oscillator for a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO), which will give the Sprites' radios better frequency stability over wide temperature ranges. We've also added a hole and two pins to the board for interfacing with the deployer.

I'd also like to keep everyone updated with our launch schedule. CRS-3 (the mission we're riding on) is now scheduled to launch on or around November 11th. That means we have to deliver KickSat in it's final flight-ready form in mid August. For everyone with developer kits, I'll need your code by early July. I'll be in touch with all of our Sprite developers as we get closer to the due date, but please keep the launch schedule in mind.

These are exciting times for KickSat. With only six months left until launch, we're nearing the final push to get everything built and tested for flight. I'll keep you updated with pictures and videos of our progress in the next few months. Thanks again for all of your support!

- Zac

Hi Everyone,

I posted slow-motion video of a deployment test in my last update and I thought it might be helpful to give a big picture overview of the whole system this time. Here is the latest CAD model of KickSat:

At the top is a 1U CubeSat "bus" that has a flight computer, radios, solar panels, batteries, and an attitude control system (to point the spacecraft) - all the sort of things you'd find in traditional satellite. Underneath that is our 2U Sprite deployer. The Sprites are stacked in individual slots, two by two, in four columns. Each Sprite has its antenna coiled above it in such a way that the antenna acts as a spring to push it out of the deployer. A carbon fiber rod runs down each column through holes in the corners of the Sprites to secure them in place. Here's a closeup:

When it's time for deployment, the carbon fiber rods will be slid out by a spring mechanism and the Sprites will be pushed outward by the stored energy in their coiled antennas.

We've settled on this design after lots of testing and analysis and we're pretty confident in it at this point. I'll keep everyone in the loop with more slow motion videos as the tests continue.

That's it for this week. Thanks again to all of our backers!

- Zac

Hi Everyone,

For those with development kits or who are playing around with programming their souvenir boards, I've just uploaded a new build of Energia. You can get it through the links on the KickSat wiki, or directly here (Mac) or here (Windows). The main differences in this build are in the radio code, which should be pretty close to the final version at this point.

In other news, we've been doing a lot of testing and tweaking of the Sprite deployer over the last few weeks and I was able to get ahold of a high speed camera to take some videos. Here's a single Sprite coming out of a prototype deployer:

Notice that it comes out with a clean major-axis (pancake/frisbee) spin. This is exactly what we're going for as it will keep the Sprite's attitude stable and prevent it from tumbling. We're scaling up the tests to more Sprites and I'll be sure to post more videos as we go along.

That's it for this week. Thanks again to all of our backers!

- Zac