NOAA APT Satellite - Night time weather pictures!

My first and accidental attempt at receiving images from a weather satellite was surprisingly very succesful. However as I only started capturing the RF signal late in the satellite pass, it was only possible to retrieve a small portion of the transmitted image.

Receiving weather satellite images with cheap hardware

Before the Internet, anyone willing to independently obtain satellite imagery from the source would need to buy expensive equipment capable of decoding the analog slow scan video images transmitted by weather satellites  such as the NOAA APT ones. Today there are four of these NOAA satellites still operational, the NOAA-18, 17, 15 and 19. All of these are sun-synchronous satellites, which means these orbit the earth at around 800 Km of altitude and cross every latitude at approximately the same mean local solar time for each pass. This kind of orbit is useful because of the consistent illumination (by the sun) of the target upon each pass.

AMIRO - Autonomous MIni ROver

In a recent past I have been very active blogging about this project, which have occupied a portion of my free time in a rather pleasurable manner. After a period of pause I thought of bringing this project back to life, but not without providing an overview of what have been done.

Teardown of one of my first electronics projects: a PSU

This have been for about ten years a loyal companion in my electronics projects. And greater than that the fact that it was itself one of my first projects. After that time it still works like a charm.However I thought it was time to replace it with a PSU providing more functionality such as constant current and digital displays.

Modded for long range and glitch free communication

After assembling my quadcopter, one major issue I stumbled upon was the (lack of) quality of my radio system.

The Polystyrene Cutter

Having been refered to in this post, a very important tool for easy cutting of the bare polystyrene boards was custom built because of saving some money.

While these can be found on the market, good models with adjustable heat may cost over 30 euros. By analysing the kind of hardware I would need, I found that it wouldn't be such a big problem because I already had most of the stuff in my electronics scrap containers.

The only thing I didn't had laying around was the support for the hot wire, which I had to buy. I just used a metal support with a wooden holder for a conventional saw, which proved to serve the purpose just fine:

Letting it hover...

While the building phase can be an enjoyable experience, grabbing the sticks, putting the chopper on the ground, and gently increasing the thrust until that custom build apparatus starts to appear light on its stands is where the real fun begins. Would we ignore the noise of the struggling motors, and this styrofoam-shielded quadcopter would seem like a magical object for which gravity would be opening an exception everytime we wanted to. There is no magic, just technology, but still there is a sense of victory in tricking gravity in a brute force manner. Not in a magnificent scale as Howard Hughes H-4 Hercules, or lighter than air as Bartolomeu de Gusmão's flying bird, but still admirable for mimicking birds in the size and ability to fly (in a cumbersome way however), and for hovering like few of these animals can.