Some more questions because the website isn't clear:

- does the FPGA handle digital beamforming in the FPGA fabric? or it controls RF phase shifters for analog beamforming?

- will we have access to FPGA pin constraint file so we can write our own verilog

- can I get IQ samples from the antenna elements and run my own beamforming algorithm / calibration in a separate PC with possible GPU acceleration? or it will be bottlenecked by rpi5 gigabit ethernet?

You do need access to a large telescope (at least 1.2m based on the wiki article), a sensitive detector (is photomultiplier tube sensitive enough??) and most importantly, access to your local laser clearinghouse so you don't accidentally shoot an airplane, blind the pilot and got arrested, or a satellite and start a war (if you believe some guy on quora). Probably the last part is the hardest thing for an amateur

As much as I want to fly with Chinese rocket to encourage launcher competition and redundancy, export controls prevent me from doing that.

It does work at the end, but shortly after we got our first data from space, I decided to quit the space industry and become a test engineer at a terrestrial embedded company instead

Interesting demo by Huygens Optics: https://youtu.be/qi8jmEbWsxU?si=rj0I3k-l74Xhg7vC

Delta 2 rocket exploded during launch, raining flaming debris everywhere and the announcer says we had an anomaly

They way they're trying to solve it is very similar to this article, by doing the USB-PD negotiation during U-boot bootloader stage:

- https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

- https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20241015152719.88678-1-sebast...

Blog post: https://moyix.blogspot.com/2022/09/someones-been-messing-wit... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41212072

As a space engineer this is very wrong, no satellite solution can beat the reliability or throughput of a submarine DWDM fiber. Satellites are vulnerable to solar storms, cosmic radiation, nuclear attacks, jamming and a lot of other external factors while fiber cables are safely buried / submerged, protected against those kind of problems. Except for ship anchors and fiber seeking backhoes.

Another thing is that satellite to ground downlinks are still using RF, which is getting congested. You can work around that by going to optical downlinks to get the speed, and in ideal world you can have DWDM fiber speed that way. But got a cloudy sky and you lose your connection

> StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, centimeter-sized, gram-scale, interstellar spacecraft envisioned for the Breakthrough Starshot program,[1][36] a proposed mission to propel a fleet of a thousand StarChips on a journey to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, about 4.37 light-years from Earth

FPGA toolchains are infamous for one of the worst and cursed toolchains in the world. Where writing tcl scripts to imperatively connects blocks together in a block diagram that will integrate all the verilog code is not just normal, but encouraged. Because their internal block diagram description file is git hostile