Occupation During Times of Prolonged Remote Working
By: Frank Hogervorst
Tags: Space, Rapid Prototyping, Cubesat, DIY, Remote Working

While the global pandemic has created innumerable challenges around the world, on the positive side of things, it has also allowed for many new hobbies to be discovered and pursued. In my household, some of these involved baking our own bread, keeping a sourdough starter alive, monitoring our crops in the vegetable garden and spending time to teach our adorable cat some new tricks!

While these were mostly fun, these new hobbies have also introduced new “problems” in the event of a full-time return-to-office scenario! For example: What if we return to work and temperatures in the house drop, causing the proofing time for the dough to fluctuate considerably with what we were used to during the period of remote working? What if we forget to water the plants in the garden because we forgot about them (out of sight, out of mind)?

Of course, there are always ways around it: you can set alarms to remember to check the garden, or proof and bake your bread in the weekend. However, for me, this presented itself as a golden opportunity to prototype some solutions using some simple development boards, sensors etc., and get hands-on experience with different communication protocols and coding languages. This was not only fun to do and allowed me to utilise some of the skills I learnt on my job, but also helped me expand that knowledge to feed back into processes within Craft Prospect. Of course, this could never have been so easy without the different DIY blogs out there, especially this one, which have inspired and helped me with concepts / schematics / code snippets which can be directly utilised to build such projects quickly. In turn, I felt it would be useful to log some of my experiences in a blog post here. And so, what exactly is rapid prototyping and how can we use it for simple projects? Read on to find out!

Prototyping is an important aspect of what we do at Craft Prospect. As many of you might know, as part of the development process, it often happens that you are unaware of the problems regarding the integration of hardware until you’ve made your hands dirty. Making sure to identify and fix low-level problems allows you to have a more robust system later. The same also holds true for the solutions of my “problems” at home. Let me give you a few examples.

For the garden, I have built a small monitoring station that logs the temperature of the air and the ground as well as soil humidity and pushes that to an IoT server. This allowed me to see if the soil temperature was high enough at the start of the season for my seedlings to survive the Scottish weather. This initial prototype highlighted power consumption problems with the battery only lasting less than a week outdoors. I found software solutions which stretched the operational time from a few days to over a week which made it a little more usable. Using all the knowledge I acquired during this process, future versions will move towards a non-development board solution allowing for much lower power consumption when idle.

The above process is exactly like the development of hardware for space missions (which is what we do at Craft Prospect) where initially you want to test out the basic functionalities utilizing development boards before moving on to bespoke solutions in the right form factors to integrate into a CubeSat.

Let me move on to another example. For the proofing of dough, we needed a tailored solution as well, since temperatures in the house drop to 12 degrees C during the winter. This brings the fermentation of bread and the sourdough starter itself to a halt. At the same time, we were interested in making our own tempeh, requiring a constant temperature of 31 degrees C for a few days for correct fermentation. We realised that the addition of a small growth light would also help to kickstart the seedlings for our vegetable garden in the next year.

Therefore, we started to build a box with a 14 W terrarium mat, normally used to make reptiles comfortable. Here, we added a normal light to see what is going on inside as well as a grow light to support the photosynthesis of seedlings. Then we controlled everything using a NodeMCU development board with a relay to control the heater, the lights and a fan which was necessary for air circulation. The development of this PROBO (proofing box), gave me valuable insights into working with different power levels, voltages, and continuous operations. Also, limits on the number of IO’s pushed the development of the controls from physical switches to a local webserver which not only looked neater but also allowed for remote control of the PROBO. Future improvements will likely host some way of verifying the status of the proofing process, potentially leveraging imaging systems and AI.

At Craft Prospect, a space-engineering company, I apply my enthusiasm towards the development of practical systems at the Responsive Operations team, where we try and innovate smarter solutions in space. Currently, I am focussing on automating the image processing chain and moving some of the processing to the space-segment using AI at the edge, there where it adds value. On-board processing allows us to respond in real-time to detected features in captured data without intervention of ground based operators thereby reducing down-link requirements and increase the efficiency of operations.

To check out more of our blog posts, click on the link here. If you are interested to work with us for space-related solutions, you can check out our portfolio here and send us a message!