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Member Since: December 11, 2015
Country: United States
I have used a couple of the 9602-based RockBLOCKs and have a had a very positive experience. But I seem to recall from discussions on the arduiniana.org site that the IridiumSBD library for Arduino was not compatible with the 9603.
I also see that Mikal Hart has released v2.0 of that library on github. Does anyone know whether that new version is compatible with the 9603?
Thanks for all these ideas. The way I see it, I get those first 50 characters for my 1 token expense. As soon as I need to exceed that length, I look for the types of optimizations you all are suggesting, to keep the message under 50 characters. I will use a look-up table on my next attempt b/c I want to have a bunch of diagnostics. Originally I was relying on the emails to see the data, so human-readable made sense. Now that I also receive by http and parse the payload, store in database, render to web page, I have more flexibility. Thanks for the ideas!
In backyard testing, I got some transmissions that were within 1km and then others that were 100km away. I might depend on where the sat was when the connection was made, how strong the signal was. Anyway- it was not accurate enough to use reliably for me. I am using a Ublox 7m into an Arduino and out through the RockBlock and that works well.
Yes, but that's pretty verbose. I sent messages under 50 characters like this: 151021025831,42.0873,-63.1774,4.20,315,44,29
That's YYMMDDhhmmss, lat, lon, voltage, mast1 position, mast2 position, logging interval (min)
I was thinking of next time using base 16 (or higher) for numbers to save a few characters.
Oops, I'm wrong. Looks like you can send 2-way. But if you're at a computer, I don't see why you'd want to plug one into a computer just to get the message. It only takes seconds to go from the ground station to you. Plus, you'd need to be outside with your computer to receive the 2-way communication. I guess if you wanted to get a message from a place without wifi to a place without wifi, this would work.
Bear in mind that you pay about $0.10 for each short burst of data each way, which is about 50 characters. Plus around $15 per month to have an active account. You buy the tokens in bundles. The pricing seems to be set by Iridium because you can get just a modem and use another reseller. But this is a really nice package they put together.
Yes, that would be cool! So I did it! I have a Google site that documents the project (and it continues- I will launch another attempt in 2016.) Here is the track from this October: http://gortondesign.com/gortobot/tracker.php
I used a RockBlock with Arduino Pro Mini for this and even under a 1/4" plywood deck (epoxied) and bouncing around, it got a signal each time in about 10 seconds.
I can attest that Rock Seven customer service is excellent. Great to see this distributed from the U.S., as getting it from the UK added quite a bit (currency conversion plus shipping).
The IridiumSBD library that Mikal Hart wrote is great. He helped a group in Texas get a HAB over 100,000 feet.
If you're interested in my project, chime in on the disqus page.
No public wish lists :(