Saturn V Documentation
Mach 30 wants to publish the best documentation for open source hardware projects in the world. In fact, we must do this to achieve our mission of hastening the advancement of humanity into a space faring civilization. Why? Because space is hard and we don’t want to make it harder for other makers by providing incomplete or inaccurate documentation.
And you can help us without writing a single page of documentation. How? By making your own copies of Mach 30 projects and providing feedback (in the form of comments on project forums) about what worked, what didn’t work, and what was confusing in the project’s documentation.
Want to take it a step further? Share pictures and videos of your creation on social media. Or go all the way and join us for one of our weekly stand up meetings and tell us “in person” how things went. Bonus: you’ll meet other makers who share your passion!
That’s all it takes. You get to make cool things (anything related to space is instantly cool) and we get to find out what we overlooked in our documentation (from a misplaced comma to uncommitted source code to a typo in a part number). Plus, at Mach 30 we firmly believe in giving credit where credit is due. So we make it a point of thanking our friends and volunteers with everything from tweets to t-shirts to mission patches to community awards.
Ready to be part of our community of makers? Great, because the Mach 30 Integrated Product Team for Ground Sphere needs your help. Right now we are testing out whether you really can download images from space (weather satellite pictures to be exact) for under $30. Every step of our test is documented so you can dive right in and try things out for yourself. This is a great opportunity to check out Software Defined Radios (SDRs) and satellite orbits. And, once we wrap up Apogee III, we will turn our attention to using what we learned to design our third generation ground station, which will mean lots of small and medium sized projects to make and share. Leave a comment below or on the Ground Sphere v3 forums to get started.
ad astra per civitatem – to the stars through community