This blog contains general musings about professional development, and other activities undertaken between client projects.
Star Tracker: Daisy Chain
As I mentioned in the earlier post, being able to daisy-chain devices is an important goal of the star tracker project. Longer term, I want this to be an entry point to a broader family of small-satellite modules built around SatCat5.
By “daisy-chain”, I mean there’s an upstream host that provides power and data to the first module. The first module is connected to the second, the second to the third, and so on up to some reasonable limit. In a satellite, the host is probably the vehicle’s flight computer. On a lab bench, the host is probably a dongle attached to a regular PC. Let’s assume for now that all the modules are star trackers:
Ubuntu 26.04
For the new workstation dedicated to Keppytronics consulting work, I chose Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
Long story short, I’ve mainly been a Windows user since childhood, starting with Windows 3.1. Looking back, I think everything since Windows 2000 has been a mistake, slowly ramping up the heat like the usual frog-in-boiling-water metaphor. Windows 2000 was great, Windows XP was fine, Windows 7 was OK, Windows 10 got on my nerves, and Windows 11 was intolerable. Every little thing was too slow, too web-obsessed, too privacy-invasive, too pushy about AI. When every patch makes things worse, I know I’m not in their target audience anymore. Unless Microsoft completely changes its tune, I’m never giving them another dime if I can help it.
Keppytronics and AI
In short, I will not be integrating LLMs into my workflow for the foreseeable future.
My objections at this time are a combination of ethical, strategic, and practical concerns.
First, I have ethical objections to the wholesale scraping of all human art, literature, and software. In particular, open-source code must inherently be available to the general public, leaving it widely available to be scraped for training, giving it a disadvantage against proprietary software. Many models can and will regurgitate large portions of that training data, with no credit or royalties to the original source. Though it would be absolutely hilarious if a court ruled that ChatGPT was violating GPLv2, regurgitated code is likely free of the original license terms.
Star Tracker: Intro
Over the next year, one of the side projects I’d like to build is a prototype star tracker for cubesats.
While I worked at The Aerospace Corporation, one of my ongoing cubesat projects was development of the star-tracker first used on OCSD (AeroCube-7). In short, it was an FPGA board that could take in video streams from several cameras and do various things with the data: such as store an entire frame as RAW or JPEG, capture a video stream, co-add consecutive frames, apply adaptive thresholds to detect bright objects, etc.