UKSEDS 25th annual conference at Bristol in February 2013 was a great event with exhibitors displaying a range of satellites, rovers, a model of the Skylon engine, educational material, and talks about all of these and much more.
The KickSat display on the BIS table generated plenty of interest, and speaking with attendees made it clear that personal spacecraft, such as KickSat Sprites, are becoming increasingly popular.
A question asked at the BIS stand by one enthusiastic group was, is anybody doing anything to track all of the CubeSat, ChipSat, Thin-Film and other interesting devices that are likely to be put into orbit in the coming years? The answer to this question came later from a conversation, and then presentation, by three students at Bristol University that have been commissioned as part of a small team to create ‘The Pocket Mission Control App’.
The Pocket Mission Control App will feature augmented reality on mobile devices, and will be open source allowing private individuals and researchers to manage personal spacecraft as well as viewing the location, telemetry and historical telemetry of third party spacecraft. A 3D model of each type of spacecraft might also be added to the app for reference.
The fundamentals of this app are well advanced, and the team are confident that it will be released in time to help BIS members and all interested parties track KickSat Sprites in September 2013.
We wish the team well, and will report developments as we hear them.
Andrew Vaudin
The KickSat development kit code examples use C/C++ programming language.
At the recent UKSEDS presentation did the team mention what the open source Pocket Mission Control App for iOS and Android is being written in. Is it C/C++ or possibly Java ?
Hello Paul,
KickSats are programmed in Arduino, which as you say is very similar to C/C++.
I presume the iPhone App will be written in Objective C – the functionality seemed beyond what HTML5 could muster. Most of the presentation concentrated on the back-end with lots of diagrams that would have made more sense to you than me
Pocket Mission Control is built using the Unity3D games engine which gives us native Android, iOS, MacOS, Windows and web applications from a single source tree. The front end is mainly JavaScript and C#, the back end is mainly Ruby on Rails.
Thanks for the info Michael. I remember the Ruby on Rails part of the presentation now that you have jogged my memory, although I was busy taking photos for the three presenters at the time.
Good luck with the project and I look forward to trying it later this year.