SatNOGS Ground Station v2
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Satellite Networked Open Ground Station
This page contains info on the v2 ground station which has been depreciated. For the latest info on this project please see this page: SatNOGS_Ground_Station_v3
The intent is to make and deploy a SatNOGS ground station at Bloominglabs. This is a satellite tracking system with azimuth and elevation control to point VHF and UHF antennas at satellites as they pass overhead. The SatNOGS project consists of 4 separate projects actually, the ground station is just focused on a 3D printable and easy to build azimuth and elevation tracking system.
More information about SatNOGS can be found here. They won the awesome 2014 Hack-A-Day challenge, their submission video is here.
Revision V3
All of the previous work on this was with the V2 rotator box. Since then, V3 has out-dated most of that work. Some day I plan to make a laserable enclosure for V3 which reduces cost by eliminating the 20/20 aluminum extrusion which adds significant cost to the build.
Parts - V2
The original project is sized to use all metric PVC for the 3D printed parts. In the US metric PVC is hard to find, this repo has parts resized for American PVC sizes:
- https://github.com/Paul-NA8E/satnogs-hardware/tree/master/Tracking%20box
- Updated axis-sides, print these instead of the ones in the above repo unless it's been updated since Feb 5th 2015
This link has a bill of materials and assembly directions. Please note that the links to parts from this page link to the metric versions so be careful.
Laser cut parts
3D printing parts is awesome, but incredibly slow. I've taken the imperial STL files and converted the ones which are suited for laser cutting to SVG's. The axis gears, worm gears, and axis pillar are not included as they can't be cut correctly by laser, these must still be sourced by 3D printing. Material thickness is fairly critical for laser cutting. Sheet 1 needs to be cut from 3/8" (.375) thick material. Sheet 2 needs to be cut from 1/4" (.25) thick material. This is especially important because the axis gear spacer needs to be the correct thickness. Also, sheet two has the homing sensor holder which is in two pieces. If you look at the STL for the part it will be obvious where the small rectangle needs to be glued or otherwise mounted.
Further finishing details: red lines on any parts should only be ran at minimal power for marking purposes only. All other colors should cut all the way thorugh the material. The axis sides require 6 screw holes plus two long holes drilled for the stepper motors to mount. The homing ring must have the "nose" filed or sanded down so that it can fit between the optical sensor lobes. The bearing holder cup requires hand filing between the tabs so that the axis gear can fit closely to the worm gear. Also the bearing hole needs to be counter-sunk deep enough to completely hold the bearing. Technically it is possible to laser this hole out but it would be a slow process. As I mentioned earlier, on all of these parts there are markings (in red in the drawings) to give you easy indicators for manually finishing the parts out.
Additionally, all of the individual parts are here if you want to reconfigure how they are cut.
I did not include the azimuth axis pillar for two reasons. First, laser cutting this part is futile as it would require being turned on a wood lathe afterwords which may not be everyones cup of tea. Second, the PVC holes on these parts are sized for 1 1/4" exactly which is not an actual PVC outside diameter. Wooden dowel rods will fit so for now that is what I'm using, I plan to fabricate my own equivelant part for the axis pillar.
