Satellite Hacking Cyberdeck v2.0

hi and welcome back to the save it for Parts Channel today I'm starting a brand new cyber deck project and of course with any good cyber deck that means a brand new Pelican case well not brand new used of course and we're not actually going with the monster Pelican case here although this is for a related project I'm actually going to be building a cyber deck with this one here now this is For an upcoming exhibition out at open sace 2024 in San Francisco that's going to be happening uh June 15th and 16th and I'll be out there along with a whole bunch of other YouTube creators makers amateur scientists all kinds of cool people who will be talking about science exhibiting their DIY projects doing all kinds of neat stuff so if you're in the San Francisco area check that out I'll throw a link down below my particular project is going to involve a small radio telescope and the actual antenna is going to live in this guy basically just got this as a shipping case however I want to build a computer to run the thing and my old cyber deck worked pretty well for that but it's starting to show its age some things are falling apart there's things I wish I'd done differently when I built it so that's why we're starting essentially from scratch here now I've only got a few short months before open sawu starts so I've been collecting parts and pieces for this like I said we've got the L new Pelican case here and that's going to basically sit like this it's going to be something like an old Osborne one computer with the screen and the guts in here and the uh keyboard down here which of course cats love to play on got a whole box full of junk that is going to go into that uh first off we have a Raspberry Pi 4 we have one of these uh cool light up hacker keyboards I've got a few USB hubs and whatnot a bunch of this stuff came from axman Surplus where I like to get a lot of my tech stuff especially if it's old obsolete or weird axan Surplus probably has it we've got some velcro tape as always to secure things in there a couple different uh panel breakouts for different cables so I can have front panel USB Ethernet serial Port some of these I actually had to buy on Amazon can't find everything used or secondhand unfortunately we have a Raspberry Pi touchscreen I believe this was a secondhand one this was left over from another project that I was working on uh with the wall scanner uh I got a couple of these old screens and this is just one that I don't need to power this thing I picked up a bunch of these uh flat pack external laptop batteries from voltaic again these are from an auction so I only paid like $20 each and I've got a couple of these so I'm hoping I can make an insert where they go right inside the device and they can be potentially hot swappable although we might need to think that out a little more we have another little accessory box this is going to hold things like a software toine radio filters wires adapters all the stuff that I need to interface with my satellite antenna and potentially other radio projects in the future more cables uh a nice little goodie bag of axan surplus switches buttons even more axeman Surplus stuff a somewhat Universal memory card reader more axman Surplus stuff they actually had some USB to serial cables and these are pretty important I use these all the time for interfacing with old devices so how do I get all of this garbage to fit into this case in a usable efficient and practical way with the old cyber deck I basically just started jamming stuff into a Pelican case I did a little bit of planning I did a little bit of custom fabric I'm going to do a little bit more CAD work computer a design and then I'm hoping to leverage some of my uh maker tools like the laser cutter and the 3D printer to make some custom interfaces for this uh make a custom front panel so we'll have our keyboard or display extra buttons and switches USB ports All That Jazz and then everything folds up and becomes waterproof and portable I'm going for a more modern take on the old luggable PC Computers of the early 1980s there's just something about that form factor that I think is really cool now I've never been much of a Precision measurement and Mathematics guy and even when it comes to CAD design I don't have a good way to accurately measure this opening with some of these little bumps and ridges that are in here as well as these little offsets where I want to put the thing so instead what I've done is take a picture as far away as I can to minimize Distortion throw it into Photoshop or in this case trace the outline along with all the bumps and curves laser cut that into some [Music] cardboard and then we just take our piece of cardboard and see if it fits in there this one needs a little bit more adjustment but it's getting pretty close and that one is a perfect fit so this is what I think of when I hear people talk about rapid prototyping so I'm trying to leverage my 3D printer a little bit more for this project I've been making these boxes uh these are from a open box project on thingiverse and the fellow that did these uh made them customizable so you can specify the internal or external Dimensions this one is going to be for my battery packs and then this one is going to be for a box of extra goodies the rtlsdr and things like that so these will be sitting inside the cyber deck kind of like Drive bays and then I've been making these uh Lids just in kind of an accent color that uh somewhat matches my hacker keyboard here now I still have a bit of a LoveHate relationship with the 3D printer it seems to work decently well for very simple things like square boxes although I'm still having issues with uh these lids for some reason this one kind of popped off the bed and deformed a little bit so I don't think it'll open and close properly this one just got like 3D printer cancer this one is mostly okay it's got a little a little bit of damage here and there but I think it's pretty functional so um yeah we may or may not have to reprint one or more of these but uh we'll see how it goes now you might think this Pelican case is way bigger than I need for a cyber deck for just a Raspberry Pi and a little screen but remember I'm also trying to cram all this other junk in there so we're actually getting close to the limit for how much I can fit inside of that case there are also some uh protrusions here from the molding process I don't think these are structurally necessary I don't think they actually do anything to benefit the case they just take up a little bit more room so I'm going to go ahead and grind some of these off so I've actually just discovered that these studs I ground down on the bottom have little holes in them I want this to still be waterproof so I'll probably just plastic weld those up even with the obstructions gone these two boxes these Drive bays are going to take up quite a bit of the case almost 50% of it so there's not actually room for the card reader I wanted that to go in along the top but it doesn't fit with these other ridges and these are actually structural ridges I think so I'm not going to be grinding those down now there should still be a little bit of room up here I could put some extra ports I could put some antenna connectors so we're not going to waste all this space around the edges but um it does kind of limit what other gadgets can go into the box well so far all the major components mostly fit I'm doing my cardboard mockups unfortunately my little bag of fancy buttons and switches is not going to fit I thought maybe I'd have some soft keys in there I'm trying to film this right now with a box full of ducklings in the same room and they're very noisy okay this next Cut Is For Real we've got a big sheet of black plastic in here from the hardware store this is uh hdp and it's so big it doesn't even fit in the laser cutter I thought about lasering it in half but we've just got the whole laser cutter set on top of the plastic so it's time to try an actual cutout of that front panel all right so I've actually run this three times now to try to get all the way through the plastic and it really didn't get all the way through the plastic going to have to experiment with this some more we also had a little Excursion here with the laser it just decided to f off this direction for some reason so yeah uh always a learning curve with these tools that one got the panel outline but did not successfully cut through all the internal [Music] cutouts that one looks like it worked a little better we do still have a little bit of cleanup to do there's all this so on everything so we're going to have to wash this off but I think that looks pretty good next I 3D printed a few custom angle brackets and epoxied some nuts on there and then epoxied those into the Pelican case so now I can start to get everything assembled biggest comment I got on the prior cyber deck build was why didn't I just use a Raspberry Pi instead of some random old computer I found well fine we're using a Raspberry Pi this is a model 4B this is one of the very rare occasions when I actually use zip ties for their intended purpose got to make sure to get a little cat hair in all the crevices as I put this together okay I can already tell things are getting tight with the USB cables here so I'm probably going to have to order some right angle adapters to get uh USB plugs into these top two ports I'm also trying to allocate my 2.0 and 3.0 ports I think down here these are going to be the 3.0 and then my extra USB ports up here are just going to be 2.0 so I will need to uh get both of these USB hubs in here somewhere as well let's just do another test fit here make sure all this nonsense still fits in our dry box yeah I've still got some wires that need to be hooked up to things all right so that looks great but I forgot to hook up anything for power for the Raspberry Pi so we have to pull it out get the power hooked up and then we can turn it on and make sure everything works so I'm really hoping my little Screen Works because I've epoxied in place I've used it before with a Raspberry Pi and it worked fine but it sure seems like it's having some issues now I think part of the problem is this leite hacker keyboard I got has a bunch of LEDs under the key caps and that just draws way too much power these raspberry pies the main problem I have with them is that no power source in the universe actually Powers these things they made them USB but they made them so no USB device can actually power them except the special Raspberry Pi branded power adapter so I am endlessly frustrated by that um I wish they had made it so you could power it with any old USB Supply this thing here is a pretty big battery Bank it should be putting out plenty of power that's actually a quick charge port and it's still not enough to run the stupid pi4 okay I had to do some emergency wire rerouting but we have the thing booted and yeah it looks like the touchscreen works fine now it is still complaining about low voltage but I've just grown to expect that anytime I've used a Raspberry Pi it always has low voltage okay I got script Kitty mode turned off on the keyboard so we're not getting that low voltage warning anymore and there we go everything seems to be working so far this is looking awesome already I'm still trying to decide if I want a custom panel on the keyboard side right now I've got it so things can velcro in place like our power supply and The Mouse and the keyboard pops out we have a backup battery in the bottom of it here so that all Clips back in so the real question now is will this still fold up and close with all this stuff in place all right we're good to go all right well this thing is basically done I've got one or two more little steps to do I can take the screen protector off I've have to hook up some of the antenna cables and we need to cover it in stickers but otherwise I think it's basically ready to bring out to open sauce and start running our satellite dish antenna and then of course I'm looking forward to using this with a bunch of other projects assuming it survives Open sauce of course um this is going to be very interesting to get through the TSA because of all the interior DIY stuff and just the overall homemade nature of it so I'm hoping it'll make it through the airport we're hoping it will make it through open sace and then it'll show up on some future videos running various satellite dishes radio astronomy stuff other radio experiments and things that I probably haven't even thought of yet so I think it's time to do an all up Allin integrated test so we've got the cyber deck set up out here we have the antenna set up I'm going to be running the cyber deck on the battery to see how long it actually lasts well it lasts through an entire scan and we're going to do a scan of my garage this time we've done the southern sky before we know what that looks like we've scanned my house I know what that looks like I've not scanned my garage yet and I just added a bunch of antennas to the roof so that could be kind of interesting to see what does this antenna Farm look like in KU microwave [Music] band all right our scan is done this is our preview image so how this works is it just takes an absolute value of the signal strength and writes it to a very small bit map that was just a quick and dirty way to get a preview of how it was working I could probably try to improve that somehow but I've really been too lazy to do so and honestly I kind of think this weird red and black goes with the theme of my cyber deck so we're just going to leave that preview image alone but we can go ahead and run the actual image processing script now so we run that against our raw data file and hopefully that gives us a pretty picture there we go that is what the garage looks like in Ku band so I'll throw some overlays up on the screen here and I'm going to use some different color maps with matte plot lib that's the python library that I'm using to visualize the signal strength heat map we can see my garage at the lower right we can see a tree on the far left we can actually see a very faint ghost outline of some of my antennas on the roof and then here is the visible light image from exactly the same location taken with a wide angle lens so I'll do a few dissolves in between here and you can see how the features match up now I'm not 100% sure what all the noise in the sky is since this scan took about 2 hours to complete those could be passing aircraft it could be radar I don't really know I just consider it to be background noise and my battery bank here still has three bars of juice we started with four so yeah I think this will run just fine yeah I don't super love the little extension USB cable here we might come up with something slightly different for that this other Drive Bay here is our accessory box so that is just a little utility tackle box and that contains a bunch of adapters antenna wires charger stuff USB cables an extra RTL SDR we can also fit a couple more things in there such as the Wi-Fi antenna of course we have all of our Port breakouts so we can hook up ethernet cereal HDMI we can have an external monitor for this plenty of USB the ones down here are USB 3 these up here are USB 2.0 these extra antennas here we're going to have one for GPS and then this auxiliary one haven't quite decided yet what that does of course we have our touchscreen interface still having a few issues with the resolution settings on this but we'll get that ironed out let's see we also have a headphone jack down here that just goes into the Raspberry Pi's four-way audio video cable the whole thing is designed to close up with no penetrations no holes in the outside case so it should be completely waterproof just go ahead and shut this down here I have a lot of trouble with raspberry pies not wanting to shut down this is the first one I've had that actually does turn itself off when I tell it to shut down usually they just get to a terminal and hang forever and I have to unplug them if you want to know more about the microwave imager part of this project I will throw links to my prior videos on that down in the description as well as links to my GitHub pages with all the code that I wrote for this make sure to like And subscribe so you see the future Adventures of the save it for parts V2 cyber deck thanks for watching and we'll see you next time e

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 97,039

Keywords: cyberdeck, computer, diy, homemade, raspberry, pi, hacking, satellite, space, radio, sdr, amateur

Id: bSJSktT07bo

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2024