Mastodawn

New blog post: ESCAPADE telemetry. In November I posted about decoding the telemetry of this Mars twin orbiter mission. @pistonminer
did additional reverse-engineering, and I wanted to revisit this and dig deeper in the telemetry. In this post I go over some details of the flight software, including file downlink, logs, and on board scripting. I also find some quaternion data and gyroscope data that are a good match, plus other quaternions that I don't know how to interpret.

Show thread

pistonminer Nov 28

TUBIN will be reentering the atmosphere and burning up in ~2-3 weeks, and we will try to track it and download data for as long as possible during the reentry process. If you have a ground station in Europe capable of receiving on ~2260-2270 MHz and would like to help receive telemetry and images before and during reentry, check out the receiver https://github.com/PistonMiner/hispico-receiver and forum thread https://community.libre.space/t/tubin-tubsat-27-re-entry/13998/

If you decode anything, please feel free to tag me :)

GitHub - PistonMiner/hispico-receiver: Software receiver for the HiSPiCO transmitter

Software receiver for the HiSPiCO transmitter. Contribute to PistonMiner/hispico-receiver development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

pistonminer Nov 28

The TUBIN satellite takes infrared pictures and transmits them on S-band using the "HiSPiCO" transmitter. Decoding this without a matching hardware receiver was hindered by the use of an undocumented forward error correction scheme, making it inaccessible to radio amateurs. Using a "known-plaintext" pair of I/Q data and decoded data provided by TU Berlin, I've managed to reverse engineer the FEC and implemented a software receiver using GNU Radio and Rust :3

📷 Las Vegas, 2025-11-07

pistonminer Nov 19

Daniel Estévez Nov 19

New blog post: Decoding ESCAPADE. Here I decode a recording of the ESCAPADE spacecraft that I did with an Allen Telescope Array antenna the day after they were launched. The modulation is PCM/PSK/PM with rate=1/2 Turbo code. The telemetry uses CCSDS TM frames and Space Packets. The telemetry packets contain many interesting strings with log messages, which appear to be generated by a Linux system running Rocket Lab's MAX flight software. Read more: https://destevez.net/2025/11/decoding-escapade/

pistonminer Oct 18

✧✦Catherine✦✧Oct 17

i want a human sized cat tree

pistonminer Jul 3, 2025

sinitax Jul 3, 2025

> Bug template: **Version and Platform (required)**
> uhhmmm

pistonminer Jun 21, 2025

mrrrow, I'm at #gpn23 , lemme know if anyone wants to meet up :3

pistonminer Dec 28, 2024

I'm going to be speaking at #38c3 today! Come by (or tune into the stream) if you wanna hear a cat ramble about diagnosing and doing some firmware hacking shenanigans to fix a dead satellite :3

📅 Day 2 (28.12.2024)
⏰ 19:15-20:15
📍 Saal 1

https://cfp.cccv.de/38c3/talk/DSQ9FN/

Hacking yourself a satellite - recovering BEESAT-1 38C3

In 2013, the satellite BEESAT-1 started returning invalid telemetry, rendering it effectively unusable. Because it is projected to remain in orbit for at least another 20 years, recovering the satellite and updating the flight software would enable new experiments on the existing hardware. However, in addition to no access to telemetry, the satellite also has no functional software update feature. This talk will tell the story of how by combining space and computer security mindsets, the fault was correctly diagnosed without telemetry, software update features were implemented without having them to begin with, and the satellite was recovered in September of 2024.

pistonminer Jun 7, 2024

tfw you can't play factorio with @sinitax because they need to recompile their keyboard for that and they can't recompile their keyboard because they don't have another keyboard for their desktop and the laptop doesn't have the commit they need to compile and their wifi is broken so they can't pull the commit so they have to fix wifi because they can't use ethernet because that would require picking up the laptop which is obviously impossible. also the laptop just kernel panic'd

pistonminer May 30, 2024

Currently on the train to #gpn22, lemme know if you're around and wanna meet up :3 mew