scottmanley

Science Hack Day - Watch The Skies

Added 2019-10-22 15:56:01 +0000 UTC

This weekend I participated in the 10th San Francisco Science Hack Day http://sf.sciencehackday.org/. An event where people get together to design and build things, some are stupid toys, others are sceintific experiments and some even position themselves as future product prototypes.

I teamed up with https://twitter.com/the_quark and his daughter with the intention to make a physical warning sign that would point at 'threats' in the sky. They would work on the pointer driving by an arduino and a pair of motors, while I wrote the code that would collect the data and drive the thing. The first set of targets I added were near earth asteroids, I used pyephem to find the nearest objects and calculate their altitude and azimuth.

My side was going to work as a simple tornado web server with a background thread updating state, there was a simple status page (which I was going to dress up with fancy graphics), an API which the pointer was going to read for updates, and a control panel that let me change the date and time as well as accelerate time for demos.

At that point I had maybe an hour left to add another class of threat; spy satellites. The satellite mode was named 'They are Watching Us' and the device was supposed to warn the audience when spy satellites were approaching so they could hide their work. Not that they needed to, the event was indoors at GitHub's HQ. This nice idea was hampered by not having enough time to get orbital elements for known spy satellites so we just had a massive database of general satellites, missing things like the all important NROL-39.

And here's the final product working at an accelerated rate:

https://twitter.com/the_quark/status/1186016233151324160?s=20

Of course, when it came time to present things didn't work out, the arduino crashed and stopped talking to the driver laptop, and our presentation kinda fell apart as I wasn't look at what was being shown.

But hey, I learned to use some libraries I've never used before and I'll probably use the satellite data to do something interesting in the future.

https://github.com/illectro/watchtheskies