+Forgi LaGeord I was talking about earth. if two pointer point to one another, and one is on earth, and the other doesn't move, it doesn't move relative to earth.
And hookup a laser and photocell so it can communicate back and forth with freaking laser beams! Hopefully not take out any planes in the process. I imagine you could get away with
I have taken Satellite communication this semester, and I got much clear idea of a couple of topics. I am so glad I watched this video, its inspirational. Your efforts and patience are greatly appreciated. Please make more of such stuff. Thank you.
@@nathan484848 for this,maybe not,anyway you have FPV antena trackers that you can reprogram to do that,but i cant hardly refuse to buy an earth globe with a tiny ISS model on an arm,just like when they simulate the moon rotation,but with an ISS,real time.will be georgeous the 3 items or better,with the Sun.
I did not skip ahead, and this is one of the coolest things I have seen. I would pay money for it, but probably not as much as you would need to charge to make a profit. I do go out every few months and watch the ISS go over. Thanks for sharing this.
what if you add a laser to the arm and put it in a room with glow in the dark wall paper and trace out the orbit on the walls? or just do a timelaps of it.
I was thinking having a high power hand pointer laser added to it when it's outside so you get a beam pointing right at the ISS or whatever your tracking. Sometimes satellites are in shadow and aren't visible until they hit sunlight. Sometimes they are so bright they are hard to look directly at but this is very rare, so having something bright to point at it is pretty cool. Now, the guys in the ISS are probably not going to be bothered by the radian divergence of a hand held laser at that distance so it should be pretty safe optically for them. You might even send them a coded message in light pulses if added on.
If pointing a laser pointer at an airplane can be dangerous and get you arrested, I'd imagine pointing one at the ISS probably isn't a very good idea either.
I just love the level of detail you used to have in your old videos. I understand why your videos have become so much more polished and appeal to a wider audience, but I love your enthusiasm for the “boring stuff”. More deep dives!
+Felix Dietz Exactly my first thought after watching this- a laser pointer would definitely make it easier to spot the station for everyone around. I would definitely like to see a video of it in action, with the pointer!
+Felix Dietz Laserpointers are devastating to pilots a few miles away, but when reaching the ISS most laser pointers will have already lost concentration siginifacantly, becoming nothing but a VERY dim light. A big hih precision hightech laser would do - but that would be VERY dangerous
+Grady Hillhouse I'm in Austin and have a couple lasers you're welcome to try. One is a 1/2W green and the other a pretty blue-violet. The green can be seen for a couple miles. I'm outside looking up for the ISS almost every time it's visible and would love to see a video with a laser pointing it out.
Seriously... that right there... was some seriously profound and inspiring words... put it on a t-shirt and I will buy that t-shirt. Sounds like a catch phrase for your channel even. ;-)
Perfect gift for flatearthers. Try to find out why always when this points upwards in the evening and in the morning its accompanied by a shining dot in the sky!
In this project, you used your own program to calculate the trajectory, but you can go the other way. We made a similar satellite tracking device. There is an Orbitron program that allows you to obtain satellite trajectories using data from the NORAD tracking system. This is a fairly high-quality, complete software that is well suited to solve this problem. Its plus is that it allows you to track any satellites that NORAD sees knowing their number in the system, and that’s almost all that is now in orbit, down to small pieces of garbage. What's convenient, Orbitron allows you to provide coordinates in a convenient form to the driver of your device. It remains only to convert them into signals transmitted directly to the device. Our version turned out to be a little less smooth, because we used servos to control both axes, so we had a little “twitch” when tracking.
That's such a cool project and to see it actually in motion is joyful. Great work. I really hope your skills and aptitude are being utilized and appreciated in your professional career. You deserve it. Take good care.
I will add my two cents worth here after some nearly six years since this was posted on your website Grady. It was fascinating to say the least for an engineering /mechanical guy like me. Keep up the good work Sir.
What I thought was cool was that when I was in the service I was a 13R Firefinder Radar Operator and your machine has a lot of mirrors in our radar set (AN-TPQ 53). One of our first steps (since it was a mobile radar set) was to drop it within 6 inches of a known point and point the radar true north. We even a similar setup in terms of having a slip ring, azimuth and elevation drives, except ours cost about $70,000 each and weighed about 70lbs.
Katone Vi shhh,you’re wrong,the earth is a geosphere(in other words,a not so perfect sphere). Second of all if the earth is flat,then what is stopping people from digging straight through the earth?
Katone Vi Are you serious? All you need to do is go to the southern hemisphere and you see that the stars rotate around the south celestial pole, which proves we are on a rotating sphere with two celestial poles. Not to mention that geostationary satellites orbit above the equator for things like satellite TV.
I like to visit your shows. thank you. by the way, some of us visit low earth orbit every time we step outdoors, and explore this world you try to explain, one bit at a time. again, thank you.
Came here from Reddit. I gotta say, it's very very rare that I will watch a RU-vid video all the way through - I found this video very interesting and also very well made. Thanks for sharing! I'll be sure to check out your channel.
Heck, even one of the most sophisticated position tracking systems we have today, the GPS, has to have the space vehicles constantly monitored for precise location because of all the orbital perturbations, and an almanac of all the precise positions periodically uploaded to them for dissemination through their broadcasts. I knew this was the case, but not why or what it was called, but now I do thanks to this video! Thanks. The ISS does not currently have tourists, but had tourists, such as Mark Shuttleworth (the Canonical/Ubuntu guy) in 2002. It cost him about 20 million dollars and required him to train for about a year, so that's some of the reasons not a whole lot of people have done that.
Quick tip stick a red or green laser pointer on it , we went to a planatarium recently and that is what the presenter used to show it to us after the show (:
I know this was made in 2015, but now you can get a pretty convincing tour in vr! Its pretty fun to be weightless in vr, even if you don't feel like it in real life
Outstanding! It inspired me to take on a similar build. A quick visit to a favorite website and now my pocketbook is lighter, but the mailbox will soon be full. Hopefully I'll have something to show for it before too long. Thanks for documenting and sharing your project.
The first idea that came to my head for practical uses of this is you could mount a camera on a system built to handle the weight, have it zoomed in and always pointing at the ISS so it’ll take long-exposure time lapses while keeping the ISS centered in the frame!
if you strapped one of those powerful green laser pointers (the ones that create a continuous beam) to the pointer arm, that would take this awesome project to the next level.
This project is great. In the coming months I had planned on making an arduino based version of something similar to this. I understand the alternate choice of microcontroller, but the vast support for the arduino will be a huge help for me. Likely an arduino mega will be used. here are the ideas I hope to incorporate into a version of this concept 1. adding a very bright laser pointer to the arm and turning it on during visible transits 2. possible gps with magnetic compass to allow it to calibrate itself. 3. star wars bb8 inspired magnetic coupling to allow the addition of a spinning globe with the space station magnetically coupled, perhaps an LED shining on the inside of the globe to indicate the area where the transit is visible. 4. fixed position LEDs to indicate launch sites that change color as launch events approach. 5. small display - probably raspberry pi powered to provide info about the various space events that are occuring, hopefully pulled off an RSS feed. 6. LEDs inside the globe to indicate light and dark with a good representation of the terminus of the sun revolving around the earth. its quite ambitious and it likely will take me a very long time to create it all, perhaps a kickstarter to make a simplified version, and a big version to donate to museums? great work, I love it, and keep it up.
Uncle has an 11 inch scope and using the ISS tracker app we were able to look at the ISS through his telescope for a couple seconds when it was in transit overhead.
Very cool Grady. I am a ham radio operator and I have several software programs that track amateur radio satellites. I have made many contacts via these satellites, using my VHF/UHF handheld radio at about 5 watts of power, and a homebuilt, handheld antenna to point at the satellite during its pass. This is great fun and always amazes me. Back when the Soviet MIR space station was in orbit, I actually made a contact with it, and that remains the highlight of my ham radio satellite operating. I suspect your apparatus in this video could be fairly easily be adapted to control the azimuth and elevation of my handheld satellite antenna, given a suitable mounting system. That would be an interesting project.
I don't know if you have already, but you should really send the specs for this to NASA so they could build a bunch, imagine being the family member an astronaut currently on the ISS and then someone walking up to you and giving you one of these and saying here, now you can see wherever your bro/sis/dad/mom/son/daughter etc is, i think that'd be such an awesome gift for someone in that situation.
I just made a solar tracker using an arduino, two servos, gps module and a 16x2 display - the gps module solves having to enter the time and location details in the code, and it'll allow the unit to work anywhere in the world on power up and acquisition. My azimuth servo struggled with the mass of a 20W solar panel, so am going to use stepper motors and 3D printed worm drives which can hold position without power until updated - these should be able to handle the mass of a few hundred watts of panels or more depending on worm drive construction and stepper motor power. Would be nice to modify to add an antenna/telescope/camera to track satellites, planets etc to have a second life at night!
DAM your the man, im gonna have to put this on my things to do one day! this video reminded me of Smarter Everyday videos but the MCU version of it, thanks for all the work and research and provided links! gotta say im a Arduino guy all the way and thats after giving up on Parallax MCU but dam it would have been nice to post the link of that mcu you used i was sorta impress by the specs
I want to make one but put it inside a semi-translucent globe with a laser pointer that shines through to show the current location of the ISS. Thanks for the inspiration!
Incredible! Added this to favourites in the hopes of being able to build it one day :D It'd make a really interesting kinetic sculpture to just have in the lounge as a centerpiece. You could even have a figurine with one outstretched arm, forever pointing at the ISS.
This is great! I often open an app on my phone or check the live video stream from the ISS just to see where it is over the Earth, but a gizmo like this would be much more tangible reminder that the ISS (and its occupants) are constantly free-falling around us. I hope something like it can be available for purchase someday, as I lack the necessary skills to build one myself.
Beautiful piece of electronics! You should put a starpointer (laser to point at the stars at night - sorta given by the name - but you never know) on the tip, only turning on, while the ISS is near. Would look AWESOME!
Yeah - and maybe tracking other celestial objects as well. Can see from the other comments, that I´m simply not that original. :-D Thanks for great videos. Also enjoyed your gardening video, and many more.
This was super cool! Great project and nicely done. Must have been quite exciting to see it track the ISS as it passed above. It even got me stoked sitting here at my laptop.
This is awesome. Once a while, when I see a bright stop flying like a start, I use my mobile phone to verify, if its the ISS. This creation makes the ISS more lively.
Thanksgiving last year, when my family was all gathered together, my brother was using a 2m amateur radio handheld with a cheap yagi antenna he built out of hardware supplies to listen to signals bouncing off one of the hamsats. He used an app on his phone, which he could use to aim it. I bet he could use something like this for the same purpose. He has talked about actually trying to ping it, but said he either needed more power than a handheld provides, or better aim then manually pointing can provide. This would certainly provide the better aim.
Woah that's cool. Should make a bigger version that can mount a DSLR with a telephoto (or even hooked up to a telescope) lens, could maybe try to get a pic of the ISS, or any other satellite.
It would be cool if someday in the future all of our decommissioned satellites would be moved into a specific orbit to create our own artificial rings.
I need one. Like now. Keep up the fantastic content, Grady! As I am soon to be attendi g college to become a mechanical engineer, I LOVE all the math and physics content you've been putting into your videos lately!
Using larger stepper motors and a 2D router to make bigger aluminum parts, this could be enlarged enough to make a great antenna mount for the VHF/UHF Yagi.
Great video. I built a prototype solar tracker using the arduino platform 6 months ago , so this brings back memories. I'll probably try using the nucleo platform and actobotics next time around. Thanks.
place the whole contraption inside a plastic ball with a magnet on the pointer and have small metal space station you put on the outside. so it would not only show actual location but show its position on the globe. this could be a real neat kickstarter project. if it got enuf support maybe even put a wifi chip in there so it can up date its calculations.
That is really something. I am an amateur radio operator and the ISS now has a FM repeater on board. Well they have for a while but I just became aware of this. Anyways great job and you may have inspired me to try to make one of these on a slightly larger scale that you can attach a yagi onto that would track and point at the ISS for use on the repeater. Now I just need to get smarter...more smarter??? See what I mean. Again great job.
NASAs official mobile app can provide notifications of visible passes. and show a plot of its next two orbits. and set your wallpaper to the APOD everyday if you really wanna nerd out.
Great stuff. Very clean! I guess I have yet ANOTHER project to put on my to do list. My suggestion. ..add a "next visible pass in xx:xx:xx" clock and you've got yourself a marketable product.
Id hook up a small green Led to it and write the code to take into account your location and time of day so that the led lights up when the ISS is view able from your location.
what would be cool is to put a globe in the center and have a little mock ISS spinning around. That way people would know where the ISS is on the earth
Grady, I know I'm very late to the game here, but I just stumbled on this video and absolutely love it! I've had an idea to create a globe that shows the location of the ISS in real time either with a physical magnet or projected light. If you ever make something like that, I'd love to be the first in line to buy one! Thanks for everything you do!
