Ambasat-1 mesh?

Development Hardware
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Now started to shipping to the participants the Ambasat-1 kits.


There are small “Sprite-size satellites” and they will flying on low earth orbit up to 3 months. All of them have some sensors, and it will be programming to connect to the TTN network, and hopefully they will send some data back to the TTN servers from the space.

I have the idea, it would be nice to recruite some participants, to try to programing on their device a small loramesh network, working between some flying boards.
It seems, the main limitation is the resources in atmega328 on the boards.
(I have the cheapest, not flying version only).
best:
t.janos
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sounds cool! alas, meshtastic (or I think probably any mesh implementation) won’t be able to run on an atmega 328 (only 2KB of RAM and 32KB of flash on that CPU). I’m really surprised they chose such a low end CPU for this board - because a higher end CPU (with the same low power draw) takes the same amount of space and weight.

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It seems, there are two another options:

  • to change the atmega328 to more powerfull controller. (not really easy in this project)
  • to programing at least one such Ambasat-1 as a simple LoRa repeater. To try connect from the ground with two meshtastic device with good antennas through this flying repeater.
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It seems the next satellite which has “LoRa repeater” is the japanese Kitsune (“Fox”) cubesat.
KITSUNE is a 6U CubeSat with external dimensions of 100mm×200mm×300mm and an approximate mass of less than 14kg. Its planed to put orbit from the ISS soon.
Some documentations are here:

It has some interesting experiments, “missions”, the last is this LoRa one on 400-433 MHz.
http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=746 Here is the description:
“Mission 05: Store and Forward Mission (IoT Mission) (mission without amateur link involvement) KITSUNE satellite has a LORA device onboard as a receiver. There will be fixed and mobile ground sensor terminals with LORA devices. They will collect sensor data (temperature, humidity, gps location etc.) and transmit the data over 400MHz and 433MHz ISM band non-amateur frequencies. KITSUNE satellite will collect the data from the ground sensor terminals and downlink to the main ground station over 400.960 MHz non-amateur data downlink. First ground sensor terminal will be set up in Kyushu Institute of Technology campus.”

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