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Showing posts from September, 2017

CubeSat: Micro Satellites and Studies

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The arrival of fourth year for many engineering students at my university is either loved or loathed. Senior design is a large project that all engineering students must complete to graduate. The scale of the project is one that will be larger than any previously done for academic purposes. My group and I have a rather lofty project idea. We are going to design and hopefully build a CubeSat. What is a CubeSat? A CubeSat is like almost any other satellite simply much smaller. The size of typical satellites can be anywhere from a dog all the way up to a car or bigger. CubeSat sizes go the opposite direction. The sizes of CubeSat are referred to as 'U'. 1U is a 10x10x10 cm size satellite while a 2U would be simply two 1U stacked making 20x10x10 cm. Our target as of right now is to design a 2U CubeSat. The potential scope of the project is enormous and since time is limited we may not be able to complete and entire CubeSat. This being said, we are going to try our best! It...

Slashdot: News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters

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Several weeks ago, the professor who is supervising me for the summer and I were talking about technology. This is to be expected since he is an ECE professor and I am an ECE student. It started as a run of the mill conversation until we somehow managed to get on the topic of why my supervisor always needed to have an RSS feed on his mobile devices. He insisted on the RSS feed to have easy access to Slashdot. When my supervisor first mentioned Slashdot I wondered what it was. A quick google search and some reading showed that it is the eloquent sibling of Reddit. Not to bash Reddit too hard but it can sometimes be hard to wade through the heaping pile of garbage that can be collect in a Reddit thread. There isn't an up/down-voting system but the content is definitely of a higher quality than Reddit. You can usually tell a post is of a higher quality by the number of comments. The comment counter takes the visual place of the up-vote counter on Reddit. Slashdot may have a g...