#518 – Satellites and EVs with Joris Aerts

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Welcome Joris Aerts of Hiber!

• Joris introduced us to Maarten (CTO of Hiber), who we had on episode 427
• Chris had asked Joris about Starlink, but it will require “the pizza box”, which is a phased array modem that will track satellites to maintain connectivity as they pass overhead. That’s different than how the Hiber setup works.
• The Hiber team had a “theme song” as they were building the satellite: a polka
• Chris worked on a project in college (a cardboard box maze) that played “James Brown is dead” over and over.
• The Hiber satellite is a Cube Sat with 10x10x30 dimensions
• Brock Lameres talked about high reliablity lock-step processors on episode 497
• Old days was all rad hard
• Satellites these days are “new stuff but super redundant”. The main thing is making sure the box can gracefully reboot.
• Data has checksums to ensure integrity.
• They do statistical models on failed messages coming in and how likely they are to occur.
• Downlink not turned on right now
• Eccentric Orbits book
• Solar panels degrade over time, becuase they collect high energy particles. Those impact the dopants in the semiconductor.
• Lifetime expections of a satellite is about 4 years
• Their current satellite will be going up in early 2021 with SpaceX
• Shaun Meehan talked about watching some Planet Labs satellites blow up
• On The Contextual Electronics Podcast, Chris interviewed Joe Barnard about launching model rockets and some of the failures he has to recover from.
• The satellites orbit at 400 km above the earth
• Joris was surprised that working on satellites is effectively like any other type of engineering
• It has different constraints, compared to high volume applications
• Having golden backup is key in low volume applications
• They have a standard board form factor based on PC104
• “Pumpkin space PC104”
• Hiber is slowly moving away from that form factor, but there are benefits to using the standard.
• The main element Hiber makes is an SDR + Zynq, and then there is a different board with a Linux controller for the whole system
• Testing over CAN bus which Joris knew all about form his time working at Tesla
• Cost factor is really important in a high volume application
• Joris joined Tesla as an intern in 2011 and later joined full time
• He worked on the electronics for the very fancy door handles on the model S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thaX-h4oTTI

• LIN bus vs CAN bus
• LIN Bus is single master, with a 12V transceiver
• Working on a cable harness at an organizational level
• Versioning is challenging but everything can be updated
• Vertical integration helped with firmware deployment
• Joris is working on a new form factor for testing boards (Not yet named)
• Easy Phi
• NI PXI
• Link for satellite viz (Space Book)

Many thanks to our Patrons! You can join at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you’d like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite.