Motivation  

There has being alot of interest buzzing around ever since the space race started in 1955. Equipments and materials to communicate with satellites especially low earth orbit (LEO) satellites have being expensive and inaccessible. These satellites (both natural and artificial) move really fast across the sky. Hand tracking becomes tedious and tiring. Solar panels also need to follow the sun across the sky for 90° incident rays so as to increase it's efficiency.

This is where satRot comes in. SatRot takes everyone interested into the domain of the amateur satellite observation or communication community.

Who is SatRot for? 

SatRot is for anyone interested in the realm of satellite technology, telecommunications, amateur radio, application of raspberry pi. In short, anyone is free to join, use and participate in the SatRot project.

Requirements 

Mechanical 

The mechanical requirements are not much. Most of the parts will be printed using a 3D printer and few fastening bolts, nuts and screws. (N.B: due to the covid-19 issue the world is facing, we cannot access the workshops to complete the mechanical parts). Bellow are the few items required at the moment.

• Access to 3D printing
• M2.5 bolts and nuts
• Brass or plastic spaces
• Tripod stand

see wiki for full mechanical requirements.

Electrical and Electronics 

We wanted to make satrot modular, portable and completely standalone. This required some components that need to provide adequate power and control. Below are some requirements.

• A4988 stepper driver chips
• MPU-9250
• Nema17 2A stepper motors
• 12V batteries

see wiki for full EE reequirements. A soldering skill and basic circuit knowledge is also required.

Software 

The main coding language is C/C++ and as such, a basic understanding of C/C++ is required. The software engineering heavily relies on a GUI development. Qt development package is the ideal package for a project like this.

Dependencies and Packages

# C++14

- sudo apt-get install -qq g++-6
- sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-6 90
- sudo apt-get --yes install qt5-default qt514-meta-full qt514tools qt514webengine qt514base qt514imageformats qt514svg libqt5webkit5-dev qt514charts-no-lgpl qt514xmlpatterns
- sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev g++ cmake doxygen graphviz libboost-all-dev libssl-dev
# only on the raspberry pi
- sudo apt-get install wiringpi 

Proceed to the software development section on wiki for more info.

Device and Operating System

The device used for the project is a raspberry pi 3 B with the raspbian (GNU/Linux) operating system installed on it.

Telecom 

This section requires majorly:

• Custom antenna
• RTL-SDR
• RG58 50ohm cable
• SMA connectors

more on wiki