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A crash course on hacking satellites
- kanobo 6y agoOh interesting, this guide was made in partnership with the Air Force?? (see footer)
- gnabgib 6y agoYes, this is part of the Hack-a-Sat competition from Defcon.. the wired article[0] posted here two days ago[1] goes into more detail [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/nyansat-open-source-satellite-tracker/ https://www.wired.com/story/nyansat-open-source-satellite-tr... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049836
- mindcrime 6y ago"Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack, you score one of those orbiting satellites, man. You know, satellites they use to like, do cosmology, and look for oil and stuff?"
- chrisstanchak 6y agoHack the Gibson
- karmicthreat 6y agoHack-a-sat is going to be a fun time this weekend. Far enough outside most of our domain knowledge that you have to learn quick and on the fly.
- kwesthaus 6y agoAre you competing this weekend? I put together a small team for qualifiers and had a blast with the CTF problems. We did well enough to get challenge coins but not to move on to finals.
- lozaning 6y agoI saw one of the teams that is competing this weekend had like 57 people from 13 countries. Makes me feel better about my team not qualifying. Interested in watching the contest this weekend go down though. Tons of smart people doing interesting stuff.
- karmicthreat 6y agoYep! My original team wasn’t quite high enough to be top 9. We merged with another team a member was friends with.
- inamberclad 6y agoWhat is the hacking part here? This looks like how to set up a ground station.
- AtHeartEngineer 6y agoTo get started hacking satellites, you've got to communicate with them first
- leoedin 6y agoYou're not going to do much outward communication with a receive-only SDR though. Not really hacking as much as listening.
- PatrolX 6y agoTake the red pill, and find your way there.
- joncrane 6y agoI just want to take a moment to acknowledge the hilarity of the domain name. For those who don't get it: it's a play on the name of the nyan-cat meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat
- system2 6y agoI never understood why it got popular. Dancing baby was worse though.
- Lammy 6y agoI'm enjoying the section titles too: > Satellites? Orbiting MY planet? It's more likely than you think.
- _underfl0w_ 6y agoI remember hearing that Sum 41 (they're actually still around!) got sued for using Nyan Cat in a music video or something. Let's hope the author doesn't find this site haha
- tectonic 6y agoBe sure to check out https://www.hackasat.com/ https://www.hackasat.com/ this weekend as part of DEF CON!
- jeffrallen 6y agoHacking for feds... Hmm, yeah, think I'll pass on that "offer".
- caiobegotti 6y agoRead the disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
- felbane 6y agoGreat job, citizen! Here are your celebratory linked steel bracelets. Enjoy your vacation!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TuringNYC 6y agoAll the kits are sold out - has anyone found a quick way to get all the parts?
- vorpalhex 6y agoThe shame here is that the PCB isn't easily available. I can supply pan/tilt kits and SDRs, but I can't even get a CAD of their PCB to order a batch.
- Taniwha 6y agoLooking closely at the PCB I suspect he's really worried that he's going to fuck it up
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- janekm 6y agoThe PCB isn't really needed. It's just the ESP32 module and servo driver board (the one you can buy from Adafruit) combined on one PCB, the instructions show how to wire those up separately (I stared at the PCB for a few minutes trying to figure out what it had to do with hacking sats... It's just a motor driver/servo interface PCB).
- lburton 6y agohttps://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/antenny/tree/master/hardware/Antenny_board https://github.com/RedBalloonShenanigans/antenny/tree/master... seems to have the altium files
- ReedJessen 6y agoWill there be another run of kits made?
- samplatt 6y agoThey're easy and cheap to buy from arduino stores (or similar). The only part of their shopping list that I don't have in my general "unfinished projects" bin is the pan/tilt gimbal. I've built one manually before but it was a bit crappy.
- PatrolX 6y agoUS Air Force Space Security Challenge 2020: Hack-a-Sat https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991947
- anonymousiam 6y agoYes. It sucks that they only took the top 10 teams. My team scored in the top 1.5%, but did not qualify.
- elwell 6y agoI didn't know you could embed CSS animations in an SVG file. It's a thing of beauty: https://nyan-sat.com/assets/licensed/orbital_comparison.svg https://nyan-sat.com/assets/licensed/orbital_comparison.svg Be sure to view page source.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoThis seems noticeably snappier than canvas, too.
- codezero 6y agoOh gosh, now I'm going to go see how hard it would be to replicate the canvas API with programatic SVGs.
- pierrec 6y agoIt works smoothly for a smallish diagram like this, but that's as far as it goes. I attempted to create a 100% SVG music score editor and only realized my mistake after having put way too much work into it: working with large scores was sluggish to the point of making the whole thing useless. If you want snappy, I believe the best approach currently is to use a library that emulates the canvas API on WebGL (for example Pixi.js).
- sci_prog 6y agoWow! Thanks for noticing this. It is brilliant! Now just gotta think of a project where I could use this ha!
- joeraut 6y agoCool CSS animations aside, that diagram is fantastic! Edit: It also handles i18n for EN, FR and ES by displaying different titles and hyperlinks for different system languages. Jaw dropped.
- jb_s 6y agoHow can you even do that? SVG is insane edit: like this: <title>Comparison of several satellite navigation system orbits</title> <switch> <desc systemLanguage="es">Comparación de las órbitas geoestacionaria, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo y BeiDou (satélites de órbita media), Estación Espacial Internacional, Telescopio Espacial Hubble, Constelación Iridium y órbita cementerio con los cinturones de radiación de Van Allen y el tamaño nominal de la tierra, ilustración de CMG Lee. Bitmap de la Tierra https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_pole_february_ice-pack_1978-2002.png by Geo Swan. La órbita de la Luna es cerca de 9 veces más grande (en radio y largo) que la órbita geoestacionaria. Esta animación se mueve a 1 hora por segundo. En el archivo SVG, se puede posicionar el mouse sobre una órbita o su nombre para resaltarla y hacer clic para ir a su respectivo articulo en la Wikipedia.</desc>
- jamesholden 6y agoI have always wanted to do something with satellites. Especially with SpaceX and global satellite internet coming. What can I do/learn? What will be valid in the next 5-10 years? I'm not sure where to start.
- non-entity 6y agoI've seen tutorial and projects that consume data from satellites, but I imagine there's not much for the hobbyist outside that.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoYou mean like the website in the post? https://nyan-sat.com/chapter4.html https://nyan-sat.com/chapter4.html
- ColanR 6y agoI think the true hacker would learn by doing. Good luck!
- Rebelgecko 6y agoCube sats are probably the most accessible way to get involved, other than getting a job where you get paid to work with satellites. "most accessible" is relative, high altitude balloons check a lot of the same boxes and don't require a sponsor to put you on-orbit
- xconverge 6y agoBuy a rtlsdr and start by getting some images from weather satellites
- fit2rule 6y agoI wish there were a simple and easy way to connect to a satellite, at the same kind of level of effort as .. say .. connecting to a BBS in the 80's .. and access it, just like an 80's BBS - i.e. upload a message, wait for a response while the thing flies overhead/across the globe, etc. I guess this project kind of achieves that in a way. If you can build the hardware you can access a very elite messaging system. It just seems to me to be a great place to put a BBS. I wonder if there are satellites up there that have that kind of interface ..
- amenghra 6y agoOthers have wished for BBS on satellite, as far back as 1988: http://phrack.org/issues/21/5.html http://phrack.org/issues/21/5.html
- fit2rule 6y agoHey, maybe I read it there and am only just imagining it again, you never know .. ;)
- jibcage 6y agoAs a matter of fact, there are several! FalconSat-3 is the one most people connect to in the USA. I think there might also be one aboard the ISS, but most people use the ISS for forwarding APRS packets. You need an amateur radio license to connect to these, but once you have one you can get into all sorts of other radio projects around the world too :) Edit: The downside, of course, is that you usually only have (at most) a 20-minute connection window before you lose line-of-sight, since these satellites are in LEO. https://www.amsat.org/falconsat-3/ https://www.amsat.org/falconsat-3/
- fit2rule 6y agoThat is really nice to know, thanks for the info .. I'll have to find someone in my scene who can log onto falconsat, I'm sure I know a HAM or two who might at least pick up the flag and demo it one of these days ..
- ColanR 6y agoI'm surprised (but maybe I shouldn't be) that there's no mention at all of antennas. I guess it's a lot easier to get a signal from something in line of sight above you.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThere are a couple nation states that would love to take over starlink once it is activated.
- flingo 6y agoWhy do you think that? Are you just guessing?
- amenghra 6y agoSmall typo at the beginning, seems the microcontroller is ESP32, not EPS32.
- antihero 6y agoI hope they leave this up after DEFCON. It looks really easy to follow and I would like to get back into hacking on hardware when I got a bit more time.