You don’t need niche hardware to do this, if you’re handy with a soldering iron! You can quite easily modify devices intended for use on AC lines, for any conductor!
No, I'm not. AFAIK there has been years of regulatory wrangling between Starlink, Kuiper, OneWeb, etc. about who gets which orbital shell. Shells aren't yet as scarce as GEO slots but companies are already planning for a future where they might be.
For these large constellations, vehicles are generally raised slowly at the beginning of their lives, and debris spreads out as it decays downwards. A significant increase in debris at 550km would have an impact on all orbits below it, including all vehicles raising through that debris zone.
> A significant increase in debris at 550km would have an impact on all orbits below it, including all vehicles raising through that debris zone
Space is huge. Try this trick: the number of satellites in orbit is about the same as the number of planes in the air at any time. (~12,000 [1][2].)
The volume of space from the ground to 50,000 feet is about 200x smaller than the volume from the Karman line to the top of LEO alone (~2,000 km).
Put another way, we approach the density of planes in the sky in LEO when there are milliions of satellites in that space alone. Picture what happens if every plane in the sky fell to the ground. Now understand that the same thing happening in LEO, while it occurs at higher energy, also occurs in less-occupied space and will eventually (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere.
Put another way, you could poof every Starlink simultaneously and while it would be tremendously annoying, most satellites orbiting lower would be able to get out of the way, those that couldn't wouldn't cause much more damage, the whole mess would be avoidable for most and entirely gone within a few years.
There are serious problems with space pollution. Catastrophic Kessler cascades that block humans from space, or knock out all of our satellites, aren't one of them.
> The volume of space from the ground to 50,000 feet is about 200x smaller than the volume from the Karman line to the top of LEO alone (~2,000 km).
Volume is the natural way to assume space scales, but it's incorrect. Two planes can fly parallel, side by side. Two satellites cannot orbit side by side.
In the limit, if Earth had a solid ring of infinitesimal width, it would take zero volume but all orbits.
Yes, it’s absolutely a trade off against prop (argon) lifetime, energy spent thrusting, and atomic oxygen degradation of plastic components. The benefits of increased drag for these shells of thousands of vehicles must be worth it.
+1, if only for the documentation. If you haven’t, skim through it: https://pip.raspberrypi.com/documents/RP-008373-DS-2-rp2350-... it’s truly unlike any reference manual I’ve ever read. I will happily pay a few extra cents at modest volumes for a chance to get the detailed technical details and opinions from the design team.
Adafruit is pretty clearly the front-runner these days in the educational/hobbyist market, Arduino (and even SparkFun) have fallen by the wayside. My only gripe is the focus on micropython these days, it can introduce a barrier later in the learning process when you eventually need to leave the nicely organized sandbox. They still support the “Arduino” C++ libraries, but uPy is the default.
Adafruit actually focus on CircuitPython which is a fork of Micro Python but takes some of the complexity of Micro Python away. I don't personally like coding in C++ as I started my career with Perl then PHP and Javascript. Writing Python in my own choice of text editor instead of the Arduino IDE is much more my style.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a 'sensor kit' from Amazon for my son to use with his Raspberry Pi. It includes some input devices (e.g. button, moisture sensor) and output devices (e.g. LED) that can be plugged onto breadboard.
In my experience LLMs can code C++ for the Arduino framework pretty well these days. The mistakes they make, like wrong pin numbers, are pretty language agnostic.
I’m not sure why the age of majority in the region of the server would be relevant. The user is not traveling to that region, the laws protecting them should be the laws in their own region.
I don't know if "should" is intended as a moral statement or a regulatory statement, but it's not at all unusual for server operators to need to comply with laws in the country in which they are operating…
Kudos for making this exist, it was an inevitable place for the conversation to lead, and I’m actually glad it was “hacked” together as a project rather than forced into a consumer product.
The camera specs don’t really matter here, this is about having the conversation. If this catches on, it will be a feature of every smartphone SoC.
On one hand, it’s a cool application of cryptography as a power tool to balance AI, but on the other, it’s a real hit to free and open systems. There’s a risk that concern over AI spirals into a justification for mandatory attestation that undermines digital freedom. See: online banking apps that refuse to operate on free devices.
The fact that this is the most appealing option is an indication that our electrical system, both equipment and code, are failing to address people’s needs. If you get a quote for a hybrid (on and off grid) system, they’re absolutely unaffordable.
http://www.helicopting.de/
I used this to get an Ethernet link to the roof of a building using an old antenna feed line someone had left.
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