"O’Reilly Solid Podcast" entries
Rebooting a 1970s satellite with modern software and hardware
The O'Reilly Solid Podcast: Dennis Wingo on reestablishing contact with a satellite that had been silent for 17 years.
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The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, where Dennis Wingo and his team established contact with the ISEE-3 satellite. Public domain image: Wikipedia.
In the first episode of the Solid Podcast, we talked with Dennis Wingo, founder of Skycorp, in the former NASA McDonald’s where he’s been restoring the first images of the moon taken from space.
After an hour of recounting his techno-archaeology exploits — reverse-engineering the arcane analog image-transmission systems that NASA’s engineers developed in the 1960s — Dennis paused and said, “and that’s just one of our history projects.”
That teaser is where we begin today’s episode. Ready to apply modern computing to another analog challenge, Dennis turned his attention to the reboot of the International Sun/Earth Explorer-3, a research satellite launched in 1978 and commended to the heavens in 1997.
NASA decommissioned the equipment for communicating with the satellite in 1999, so Dennis set about reverse-engineering the ISEE-3’s control system and devising a way to communicate with it. In the 1970s, he would have needed custom analog hardware, but now, general-purpose hardware is powerful enough that he could do it all with software. Read more…
Talking shop with Other Machine Company
The O'Reilly Solid Podcast: Danielle Applestone on running a machine tool startup and empowerment through desktop manufacturing.
Register for Solid 2015, where you can see Danielle Applestone’s session — How to make an Othermill: From milk jugs to your door — and much more.
An Othermill. Photo: Other Machine Co.
Grown out of the Machines that Make project at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and incubated at Saul Griffith’s Otherlab in San Francisco, Other Machine Company launched a successful Kickstarter to finance completion of the Othermill back in May of 2013.
For readers not familiar with this particular type of kit, I’ll go into a bit more detail: a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) mill is a machine tool that can be controlled by a computer to move some kind of rotary cutter (such as an endmill or drill bit) to remove material from a workpiece. This is a type of “subtractive manufacturing” process.
With all of the fuss around 3D printing (known in the industry as “additive manufacturing”) these days, I personally don’t think that CNC machining gets enough attention. Although 3D printing is certainly an exciting technology in its own right, it cannot currently compete with CNC machining in terms of cost, supported material types, and range of applications. Read more…
Solid Podcast: Trip to McMoon’s
Dennis Wingo on the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, the project's Indiegogo campaign, and Skycorp.
Before and after: The first “Earthrise” image, taken by the Lunar Orbiter 1 satellite and recovered by Dennis Wingo’s Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Credit: NASA/Skycorp Incorporated.
We’re kicking off our newest series, the O’Reilly Solid Podcast, with an episode recorded in the manager’s office of a McDonald’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center. David Cranor and I visited McMoon’s, as it’s known, to talk with Dennis Wingo, founder of two audacious “techno archaeology” efforts.
In the first episode, we discuss the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which has rescued NASA’s first high-resolution images from satellites orbiting the moon. Dennis’ team reverse-engineered the extraordinary analog image transmission system that the satellites used in 1966 and 1967, digitized 14 tons of magnetic tape, and interpreted them to compose imagery at vastly higher resolution than NASA was originally able to recover from the satellites. Read more…