Nepal's Orion Space Wants to Put a Satellite on Your Desk with the PikoQube Trainer Kit

Nepal-based Orion Space has launched a training kit designed to give you a feel for what it's like working on a PocketQube micro-satellite: the PikoQube, based on the company's Sanosat-1 which reached orbit in January last year.

"A PocketQube is a satellite which has a dimension of 5×5×5cm [around 1.97×1.97×1.97"] and weighs less than 250 grams [around 8.8 oz]," Orion Space explains of the devices its trainer is designed to emulate. "[The PikoQube] is a 5×5×7.5cm satellite on the form factor of a 1.5P PocketQube. One of the side is covered by solar panel. It consists of four PCBs: EPS, OBC, COM, and payload inside, and solar panels, base plate, and other panels the make up the structure of the PocketQube."

The design of the trainer is based on Orion's own Sanosat-1, a slightly smaller 1P PocketQube built using off-the-shelf components and released under an open source license. Launched in January last year, Sanosat-1's payload includes a radiation sensor designed for use by Nepali students and a digital amateur radio repeater designated Nepal-OSCAR 116.

The PikoQube, by contrast, has a payload more suited to atmospheric use: an accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature sensor, and barometric pressure sensor. This is connected to an on-board computer (OBC) board based on a Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller running an Arduino-compatible bootloader, a communications (COM) board built around a Silicon Labs Si446x transceiver, and a electrical power subsystem (EPS) board which uses solar panels fitted to the upper side of the trainer to charge a single-cell lithium-ion battery.

The PikoQube kit is now available to order from the Orion Space Tindie store, priced at $800 — including the power, communications, computer, and payload boards plus framework, solar panels, antenna, and an RTL-SDR software-defined radio dongle.