Once again, we want to thank all of our backers! There are three days left in the campaign, and we’re at 82% funded. To current and potential backers: please don’t be afraid that the campaign won’t fund. At this point, the campaign is guaranteed to hit its goal, as our reseller partner will be increasing their bulk order in the next few days, which will put us over 100% for sure.

Manufacturing Updates

Manufacturing of our PCBs, including the hall sensor and controller boards, is now complete. Our molds and purchase orders are ready, and once the campaign finishes, we expect to receive the funds within a week and begin bulk ordering the remaining parts ASAP.

With further testing having been completed, we have also decided to revise our gearing to produce 1.2RPM on Azimuth, and 0.4RPM on elevation. This lets us use higher-quality gearboxes while maintaining good torque and rotational rates for tracking faster satellites.

Community Test Video

Over on YouTube Manuel from the ‘Build a CubeSat’ channel has been testing a prototype Discovery Drive for CubeSat tracking. In his test Manuel sets up a SatNOGS ground station with the Discovery Drive. SatNOGS is an open-source global network of ground stations and software that lets people automatically track satellites, receive their transmissions, and share the resulting data online. SatNOGS contributors typically use their home-made SatNOGS V3 rotators, but it is possible to use other rotators too.

In the video Manuel shows the Discovery Drive hardware, shows the setup, and how portable it is, shows the web UI and then goes on to show the SatNOGS setup.

Updates to fixing operation with SatNOGS

In the video Manuel had trouble with the Discovery Drive getting stuck at Zenith passes. The reason is that the Discovery Drive can rotate from -360 to 360, however, SatNOGS calculations are limited to 0 to 360. In order to make SatNOGS function correctly with third party rotators it is necessary to specify the limits in the hamlib string. This is simple for Discovery Drive. In Advanced -> Hamlib, set

hamlib_utils_rot_opts: -m 2 -r DDRIVE_IP:4533 -T 127.0.0.1 -c min_az=0,max_az=360,min_el=0,max_el=90

We have also updated the Discovery Drive wiki with further information about configuring a SatNOGS setup.