Are you one of the 20 million people out there who own a Raspberry Pi?
Actually, let’s be careful with our numbers here, and ask if you own one or more of the 20 million Raspberry Pis out there. (Many people own more than one – they can be habit-forming.)
Ever wondered what sort of project to attempt with your Pi?
Here’s one example: we used our Pi Zero as a monitoring system for some light-hearted research into cryptojacking.
We set up a power-logging network where you could browse to various websites, and track live on a big screen the power consumption, fan speed and CPU temperature of your laptop when you hit a website that had cryptomining JavaScript on it. If you’ve ever wondered why browser-based cryptomining has mostly died out after arriving in a blaze of publicity, it might help to know that in a live demo in the Netherlands, we found that, at the cheapest Dutch electricity tariff we could find, we could potentially earn as much EUR2.70 a year for a low, low, low annual running cost of just EUR84. We didn’t need a Raspberry Pi to work that out, but we used one anyway.
Well, a UK company called SSTL, short for Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, had a more ambitious goal.
Plan. Send a regular Raspberry Pi Zero into orbit, and made a video of Planet Earth with it.
Result. Success!
We’re not sure, but at the right hand side of the image, we can see what looks a bit like the proverbial ‘piece of string’ that every good project needs.
In a formal statement for the company’s press release, Sarah Parker, SSTL Managing Director, said:
I am delighted with the success of our new Core-DHS based avionics which, will give our customers the benefits of our heritage avionics stack but in a lower form factor to deliver improved power consumption and lower launch costs. The success of the Raspberry Pi camera experiment is an added bonus which we can now evaluate for future missions…
As for the technical modifications that were needed, Engineering Director, Rob Goddard, put things less formally for the BBC:
We put it in a metal box.
That may sound like carelessly casual talk, but it isn’t.
As SSTL’s own website explains:
In the mid-1970s space was considered to be such a different environment to Earth that anything sent into the atmosphere needed to be specially designed and tested for the harsh conditions of space. Naturally, this made building satellites incredibly expensive and time-intensive.
In the late 1970s, a group of aerospace researchers working at the University of Surrey, including a young Martin Sweeting [now Sir Martin], decided to experiment by creating a satellite using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The idea was bold and audacious and the results were surprising.
To show how far off-the-shelf, you-and-I-can-buy-one-too technology has come in the past 40 years, SSTL published an image taken over the Mediterranean in 1981 on the company’s first mission, with a 2019 picture from the latest mission alongside it.
To be honest, we’re still pretty impressed with the pixellated bi-level image beamed back from space in the early 1980s, let alone with this year’s one.
But we’re not surprised that the Pi Zero was up to it.
The only question is, “What project to attempt with it next?”
Leave your ideas below! (Seriously. Our own Pi Zero is ready for its next deployment.)
Jim
Thanks! That was awesome in the truest sense of the word.
Bryan
Immediate proof the earth is flat:
Video shows Britain under “heavy cloud cover.” We all know that’s a myth too; it rained there ONCE–that’s how Jack the Ripper got away.
Bryan
PS: Anyone know if the Pi camera was active for the entire flight? A full-length video would be seriously kicka$$.
Albeit I have no idea if those durable little boxes can operate during launch or what video quality would be–I’d love to see a timelapse from launch to splashdown.
Laura
There are many videos, if you search right. Rockets hitting the dome, exploding on impact or just a small trajectory where only the take off is recorded from the Cape and then crashes and burns but that’s never shown to or on MSM.
Paul Ducklin
As a sovereign independent state we’re under a bit of a cloud at the moment, even though the sun is shining right now :-)
Anon
More space junk. Imagine if everyone launched one of these little metal boxes into space with potential to collide with satellites etc… Cool idea but… yikes….
Mick
WOW! That’s amazing. I clicked through to their web site, and their Raspberry Pi image from space shows Italy actually covers half the planet; I never knew that! Every day a school day as they say.
Paul Ducklin
Remember that low-orbit satellites like DoT-1 aren’t *that* far up – I think it’s about 500km above the Earth, which is only about 4% of the Earth’s diameter (and 40% of the length of Italy).
Draw a diagram to scale (or hold a bicycle light the right distance above a globe, if you have one) and you’ll see that the view horizon from that height covers quite a lot less than half the planet.
Half way round the planet is about 20,000km (a kilometre was originally defined as 1/10,000th of an idealised distance from the pole to the equator – through Paris, naturellement – making 10,000km equal to a quarter of a great circle). Italy is about 1200km long.
Laura
A couple of Naval Captains that you may have heard of in the late 1700s circumnavigated the earth following the great wall of ice as mentioned in the BIBLE that encompasses it known as Antarctica which several nations lay claim to.. One of those was Captain James Cook followed a few years later by a Russian explorer. In Captain Cook’s log it’s recorded as being between 50 to 60000 miles in circumference and took him a few years.
Paul Ducklin
Cook was a brilliant mariner, an excellent observer and a diligent recorder. As far as I know, the miles recorded in his logs represent the distances he and his crew sailed on their voyages, including getting round land that was in the way, putting into ports and setting off again, following coastlines for observational reasons, getting blown off course or even backwards and then regaining their position. Whatever shape you think the Earth might be, Cook didn’t log the ‘circumference’ of anything.
If I have looked at the right charts, on Cook’s second voyage – the one with the ‘wall of ice’ in it for a small fraction of the total distance – his journey took in Cape Town twice, once one the way out and once on the way back, and included a masssive loop in the South Pacific, too. So there is no question of him sailing 60,000 nautical miles to circumnavigate the earth by “following a great wall of ice”, whatever the shape of the planet might actually be. His voyage was much more spectacular than that, considering the precision of his navigation when he was crossing the open sea, beyond sight of anything on the planet he could “follow” at all.
erbster2000
I’m thinking of using one as a mail server.
Tom
Yeah, I am addicted to the micro-servers of the pi (or is it a micro-microserver?).
I personally love the OpenVPN home network. Why pay for an expensive VPN when you can do it from home and access your personal network resources from anywhere.
Mail Servers are cool, but a challenge that I had is Google and Microsoft whitelist IP ranges of SMTP servers to accept mail from. So that was quickly fallen into the been-there-done-that.
But play away, they are cool! But be very careful about opening them up to the public internet. I can tell you from logs that people will try to pry open the SSH or anything else that is publicly exposed.
Paul Ducklin
For some worrying? fascinating? eye-watering? research into just how quickly the wolves will be at your door, here’s some honeypot work of our own:
Via SSH:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/04/09/knock-and-dont-run-the-tale-of-the-relentless-hackerbots/
Via RDP:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/07/17/rdp-exposed-the-wolves-already-at-your-door/
Via mySQL:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/05/25/serious-security-dont-let-your-sql-server-attack-you-with-ransomware/
Mahhn
Cool, in a scary way. Via RDP: ” the honeypots received 4.3 million login attempts at a rate that steadily increased through the 30-day research period “
erbster2000
Thanks for those words of caution, Tom. If you have any links to relevant reading, it would be useful for me to triangulate against what I’ve read so far.
Laura
The biggest scam of them all! I encourage you all not to take this as gospel but to look into all things. The question is not whether these organizations are lying and deceiving or not, because they are. The question you should be asking is why?
Paul Ducklin
Well, this is a story about the coolness of the Raspberry Pi being able to survive being blasted upwards above our planet for a while – it’s cold up there, and the air pressure is very low, so it’s a tough gig for a $30 computer!
The article isn’t actually concerned with whether our planet is a sphere (actually, given that the Earth is not smooth and regular, as anyone who has ridden a bicycle can confirm, it’s obviously not *literally* a sphere, but the article doesn’t say ‘spheroidal’ or even us the word ‘globe’). In fact, at no point does the article make any claims about the shape or curvature of the Earth.
The article does indeed imply that the Pi was put ‘into orbit’, inviting you to infer that it went ’round and round’ something in some way, which seems to be exactly what happened.
Mark
Looks like a braided cable on the right,
Paul Ducklin
Braided cable is a type of string.
(I am sure you are right, BTW, but ‘string’ has more coolness/cachet :-)