>> Who never dreamt of going to space or sending stuff to space?
You're on the IoT Show today. I have Chris.
Chris Tacke is working for Hypergiant,
the company that sends stuff to space.
We'll chat with Chris,
know what it takes to send IoT devices to space,
what is our moments that can happen as well?
That's today on the IoT Show.
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>> Hi, everyone. Thanks for watching
the IoT Show. I'm Olivier, you host.
You are going to hear Chris and I
talk about sending IoT devices to space.
The IoT and beyond.
That's basically the title of the episode. Chris, how are you?
>> I'm doing very well. Yourself?
>> I'm very fantastic.
>> Sure?
>> Yeah. Chris,
we had you on the IoT Show recently.
I recommend.NET or embedded developers.
You were already wearing the same shirt.
I really refrain from asking you
about the shirt, but I will today.
But before you tell us what this shirt is about,
a little more about yourself.
People might not know you, and we'll certainly go and watch
the other IoT Show episode with you just after.
But for now, who are you? What are you doing?
>> Sure. My name's Chris Tacke.
I've been doing.NET and embedded
development for well over 20 years now.
Anybody else who has been doing.NET on devices,
probably is familiar with,
open that CF, I was one of the founders of that.
Been doing a lot of that type of work for a long time.
I've been working for a company called
Hypergiant now for over two years,
and we do space and defense type applications.
I do software architecture and hardware builds for them.
>> That's actually fascinating.
We'll talk about that because space is
something that lots of us are interested in,
in our dream or TV shows, whatever.
But you're here to share some of
your experience in actually sending
devices and IoT devices to space and interesting anecdotes.
Hypergiant is the name of the company. Nice shirt.
I hope I'm going to get mine.
At some point, we can trade T-shirts.
>> Absolutely.
>> Yeah, we'll do that. Fantastic. Tell me about,
you were saying that you guys are
working on different types of project,
that are sending IoT devices to space.
>> Sure.
>> What are the main challenges?
We understand the notion of IoT want to connect devices,
get telemetry and information from these devices,
being able to control them remotely,
update over the air, things like that.
>> Absolutely.
>> Here, we're talking about satellite.
Something that goes all the way up,
that is not accessible.
You cannot send someone for maintenance or whatnot.
Tell me a bit more about that.
>> Yeah, really. IoT in my mind,
when you're launching into space,
it's no different than in a factory or something like that.
It's just higher consequence of failure.
It's more expensive to deploy,
and if it fails it,
you can't go fix it.
>> Yeah.
>> But right now,
the price of launch is coming way down,
with all of these different people and
different companies doing rockets, doing deployment.
Now, we're able to send up CubeSats.
In fact, you can see right here,
that's actually the size of a CubeSat.
>> Okay.
>> That what it's called a 2U.
That one's twice the size of some of this ones that go up.
That is the size actually of the one that
we sent up about two years ago now.
It was attached to the Cygnus module from Northrop Grumman,
which is used as a space bus.
It's used for supplying the ISS.
You can strap things to the outside of
the Cygnus module and catch a ride with it.
It lowers costs,
so you don't have to pay for things
like the radio on all the communications.
You just have a cable that goes to
the Cygnus and uses their communication modules
>> I like bringing to into jail for saying that,
but it's the Uber Eats of Space?
It just attach you package and sent up there?
>> Absolutely, yeah. You just strap it on to
the outside and go along for the ride.
>> Who lives up? You were saying that from your perspective,
it's similar to a factory or it can be a factory floor.
It can have specific constraints in terms of
or environment that can be stressful for hardware;
with dust or pressure or temperature.
Here, we're talking about different challenges, though.
>> Absolutely.
>> There's a vacuum,
there is the cold,
the temperature, there is the radiations.
>> Yeah, you have all of those.
In low Earth orbit or Leo,
radiation actually is not much of an issue.
Most things can survive, especially consumer electronics.
We actually launch standard old raspberry pies up into Leo.
They had no problem at all,
from a radiation perspective.
Heat is another thing.
You've go from when you're in eclipse,
so in the shadow of the Earth,
very cold to when you're in the sun,
especially if you're facing the sun,
it actually can get hot enough to melt soda.
You've got those problems, and as you said,
vacuum was also a problem,
there are things like electrolytic capacitors.
If you've got any of those on the board,
they tend to explode in vacuum.
You have to do a little bit of work to make sure
that you're not going to have those kinds of problems.
>> Can I send a Raspberry pie in space?
>> Yes, you can. You have to take off the power supply modules,
and for in our case,
since we are strapped to the Cygnus,
which was strapped to a rocket,
which is really just a controlled explosion,
they had us take off the transmitter,
so the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and things like that.
They are a little nervous about having
transmitters strapped to it.
>> Let's not have a spark that is controlled,
remotely triggered or something like that
>> Exactly. Even though you're completely shut off,
there is no power all the way through launch to your payload.
That's another fun thing.
You get launched and then
you get up in space and then they push you
out and it's not until
after you're disconnected that you even power up.
You don't know if things are going to work
reliably until it's pushed you away,
you've powered up,
and then your payload is moved around to somewhere that
an antenna can communicate with it and then you can find out,
did we actually power up and did things work?
Did we survive launch?
>> Interestingly, we are used to have the luxury of having
devices that are permanently connected or
always connected or worst case scenario,
vehicle goes into a tunnel.
It's how it gets connection again,
it's roaming or not?
>> Yeah.
>> What can happen is that kind of things.
Or not being an LTE reach distance or something like that.
But here, we're talking about a different scenario because things
are rotating around the Earth,
so what is the challenges there?
>> In low Earth orbit,
you go around the planet about once every 90 minutes.
You go from,
if you're looking at it from a ground station perspective,
so an antenna on the ground that's going
to communicate with your payload,
you go from horizon to horizon in
usually six minutes to 10 or 12 minutes,
depending on how far down from directly overhead you are.
If you get communication, best case,
12 minutes out of 90 and
the communication speeds are reminiscent of the mid 1990s.
Really slow communication.
>> You hear the modern beat.
>> It would not surprise me at all if they hear that on their end.
>> That's crazy.
That's not something where you can say, "Hey,
I'm going to log in,
do association to that device and then do
my operations or not." Or is it?
>> It really is. It is,
you're sitting at a terminal,
you SSH in,
and then you have to have command.
You are so limited on time, typically,
what you do is you script out or you write bash scripts,
things like that,
that allow you to do things as fast as possible.
You're saying, send this command that will
delete all of these data files.
I confirmed that I got on my last pass.
Begin sending all of these other things
and change the mission parameters,
like I wanted to take a picture,
but not while I'm connected.
You have to figure out at what time you're
going to be over whatever it is you want to take a picture of.
Send that up,
and then hope after it takes the picture,
you get it back around,
you pull all the data,
which usually takes multiple passes.
Did I actually get a picture of what I wanted to get?
>> Fascinating.
>> Yeah.
>> That heavily puts in perspective of how hard or complex,
but also how interesting and fun that can be.
Any moment, any bummer?
I wish the thing was closer. Do you remember?
>> Yes. Lots and lots of them.
One of the bigger problems we had,
we have one where the clock kept resetting on us.
It's really hard to do something time based when
you don't know exactly what time it is.
On that mission, we had a Raspberry Pi 4,
but we also had some Pi Zeros with cameras on them.
They were designed to take a picture of
an antenna deployment so that we can make
sure an antenna went up and things like that.
Well, because we were not in
control of the attitude of the spacecraft,
it was on the Cygnus and they were doing things,
they had to, I believe,
turn the Cygnus either for it was overheating,
something in the Cygnus itself.
They turned it and basically pointed us directly at the sun.
It was something like 30 minutes.
In the Pi Zeros,
when we built the satellite,
they didn't have good heat sinks
to eliminate a bunch of that thermal heat.
They just cooked. Every single one with the camera,
all just basically,
all of the soda, I'm sure melted and went away.
>> That defeated the purpose
of the mission or the cameras themselves.
>> That was a secondary mission,
so the primary still was just fine.
We were still able to get data and do what we wanted to do.
We just couldn't get photos of the payload itself doing it.
>> That's awesome. Is Hypergiant hiring?
I'm sure people are going, how did you do that?
>> Hypergiant is hiring quite rapidly.
We do a lot of AI and ML type work,
so constantly looking for designers, data scientists.
Yes, absolutely, we are hiring.
>> That's good to know. I'll check it out. Don't tell my manager.
Chris, well, everyone,
if you want to tune work for Hypergiant,
learn more, you can find him online.
Chris, thanks a lot for your time.
That was fascinating, and
I look forward to having you on the IoT Show again.
You need to become a regular, there is no a reason.
>> Absolutely.
>> Well, everyone, thinks watching. See you soon. Bye-bye.
>> Bye.
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