HackerSpaces and the Lunar Numbat project: Building up capability and practical expertise
Continuing on from the initial launches of a Class C rocket, the Lunar Numbat build team has been making steady progress towards launching more sophisticated avionics, along with an audio/video feed, as part of a Class G rocket.
A crucial part of the journey has been, not just creating the hardware and software, but bringing more capability and experience to the effort, in the form of organization, equipment and most importantly ... people with specialist skills.
For a long time, we've been contemplating the need for a shared space or workshop, expensive electronics equipment and mechanical manufacturing capabilities beyond that which individuals can typically justify or afford. These sorts of facilities are available in universities and specific types of government or commercial organizations, but they are much less accessible to smaller communities of individual developers.
At the end of March 2009, a Wired magazine article propelled the concept of HackerSpaces into the popular zeitgeist. So, it was an natural step to create the first HackerSpace in Melbourne, Australia, aka the "Connected Community".
The Connected Community HackerSpace was formed and operates independently from the Lunar Numbat project. A HackerSpace is much broader in scope than even a space technology project, to the point of hacking any object in any domain in any conceivable fashion is fair game. Fortunately, there is significant overlap in the types of people involved in both groups, the skills and equipment required and the artifacts created.
An advantage of the HackerSpace is that it attracts a larger community of hobbyists and professionals. These people may not be as focused or as passionate about the research and development of space technology as the Lunar Numbat team. Although, sometimes they are even more passionate. However, their skills can directly or indirectly contribute to the Lunar Numbat effort, due to the deeply embedded culture of sharing. This collaboration is enhanced by both groups utilizing commodity, open-source hardware and software. The power of open-source hardware and software communities is evident in the growing number of developers using the Arduino platform or BeagleBoard for increasingly sophisticated projects.
Since it's inception, the HackerSpace has been meeting regularly and working on a variety of projects. Many of the projects have been founded by HackerSpace members, often initiated prior to the HackerSpace and operating independently. In addition, the HackerSpace is introducing new members to those projects and bringing them up-to-speed with fundamental skills, such as PCB design and manufacture. New members also bring additional skills such as amateur radio experience, CNC milling machine design, construction using composite materials or hard-core hardware and software engineering ... and, even rocketry.
The Lunar Numbat project has benefited from this infusion of new blood and conversely, the Class G rocket development has been one of the projects around which HackerSpace members can gravitate and apply their skills.
Project progress and technical discussions have been captured on the Connected Community HackerSpace web-site and project artifacts placed in social coding repositories, such as the popular GitHub, as follows ...
A
key outcome will be to deliver re-usable hardware and software
components. In part, this is driving us to create general purpose
frameworks, like Aiko, which provide a modular, event-driven abstraction on top of specific hardware / software platforms, like the Arduino.
This is so that we can produce high-quality embedded applications and
software components that encapsulate a given set of hardware devices.
In the longer term, this collaboration between the Connected Community HackerSpace and Lunar Numbat, along with the resulting re-usable hardware and software artifacts, provides a strong foundation for undertaking the next phases of Lunar Numbat beyond the current Class G rocket launch milestone.
