One of the most fun projects that I’ve gotten to work on recently was the SolarSurfer project. A unique aspect of that project which I hadn’t done before was remote control via a satellite connection. The project is extensively documented on Hackaday; check out the logs on satellite comm overview, real-time tracking, and mission simulation.
Here is a short summary of the different project aspects:
- Developed telemetry protocol for bandwidth-constrained satellite connection with serializers in C and in Javascript (github)
- Developed end-to-end, real-time satellite communication using Rock Seven API, Heroku, and MongoLab (github)
- Developed a real-time mission monitoring website including Google Maps integration, live telemetry plots, and vehicle control (github)
For more information, check out the Github project and the Hackaday article that describe the SolarSurfer itself.