Lantern: One Device, Free Data From Space Forever - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: george graves
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 01:13:14 am
content: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-data-from-space-foreverOne way communication from satellite, and local storage.Discuss.

author: awallin
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 08:35:36 am
content: Quote from: george graves on November 15, 2014, 01:13:14 amUmm - sure why not... It's just that people who can and want to pay what they ask probably don't go on vacation or walkabouts into areas/hotels without cell-phone and/or wifi coverage.The other issue is how are they going to guarantee that there is actually some transmission from a satellite in 1, 5, or 10 years time. If there's nothing to receive this gadget is useless. I have a feeling the satellite time&bandwidth will cost much more than the receiver. Is it a bait&switch scheme where they are going to charge a monthly subscription fee at some point?fwiw, google finds these phone and bandwidth prices for satphone:http://www.globalcomsatphone.com/bgan_service.html

author: sunnyhighway
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 03:51:53 pm
content: Their main target audience is clearly the earths population without internet connection. Which is good I think. Everyone should be able to acquire the information available on the internet.Yet they market the thing on the internet. (chicken/egg problem?)

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 04:32:26 pm
content: QuoteAt 2MB/day the internet is going to take a very long time indeed to download.

author: Refrigerator
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 05:55:00 pm
content: Quote from: dunkemhigh on November 15, 2014, 04:32:26 pmWell, it's internet nonetheless.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 06:24:05 pm
content: one way .. so if i want to go to google.com or eevblog.com . how do i tell it that ?garbage.

author: Maxlor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 06:54:59 pm
content: What a curious idea. Broadcasting a library is a neat idea, and doing so globally, even more so.Of course, there are many practical problems (many of which the Outernet folks address or at least discuss), which gives this whole thing the air of an art project, rather than a practical solution for a need people are having. But I do like the idealism, and them seeming to actually get something working.I'm not willing to give them my money just yet, but my interest is piqued. I shall read up on the project a bit more.Quote from: george graves on November 15, 2014, 01:13:14 amYou're being obnoxious. Please stop that.

author: sunnyhighway
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2014, 07:26:30 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on November 15, 2014, 06:24:05 pm

author: george graves
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 01:05:00 am
content: Quote from: Maxlor on November 15, 2014, 06:54:59 pmOhh - lets discuss that!

author: cloudscapes
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 01:22:25 am
content: "Hey guys! Check what I just got, this thing can talk DIRECTLY to satellites!"

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 01:32:23 am
content: Quote from: sunnyhighway on November 15, 2014, 07:26:30 pmbwahahaaaa'users can send physical letters to the company's headquarters .Dear Outernet , can you please transmit eevblog topic 'https://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/lantern-one-device-free-data-from-space-forever'please also insert the attached comment to that topicsincerely,-begin attachment-still rubbish-end attachment-

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 09:37:18 am
content: I already have a post box and an e-mail address, so people already can send me their daily spam. I cannot even imagine how this would solve any problem.I always imagine a poor african children without shoes, they did not eat anything fulfilling in weeks, and someone drives next to them in an SUV, and hands them over "the internet" for free, helping them, because they did not have access to it.And the children asks: "Can we it it?"That is what I think about OLPC, this thing, and all the other misused charity going on.

author: george graves
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 09:43:48 am
content: Quote from: NANDBlog on November 16, 2014, 09:37:18 amWas the OLPC a failure? Didn't really follow it.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 10:00:32 am
content: It's teletext with some local caching to improve throughput.

author: george graves
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 10:12:35 am
content: Quote from: Marco on November 16, 2014, 10:00:32 amNot sure OLPC's goal was for internet access(?) - not like this device claims to solve, even in some odd one way thing. My impression was to bring tech to 3rd world countries.This article says it was a failure as far as math ability.http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2014/09/nail-one-laptop-per-child-coffin/QuoteWell, you could hand out $1000 ipads for free, and it wouldn't improve American or European math scores.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 10:22:45 am
content: Sorry, was talking about the lantern not OLPC.The problem with the lantern is that the content a lot of people would really want to have in the middle of nowhere out of a device like this would be stuff like newspapers (backups of wikipedia and ebook libraries are more easily carried through sneakernet). Which generally aren't friendly to spidering and caching.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 10:50:15 am
content: It is the same bullshit:"4.3 billion people on Earth - the combined populations of Europe and the United States TIMES FOUR - do not have access to the Internet. The majority of humanity does not have access to the enormous library of useful information that we take for granted. Books, courseware, weather information, disaster updates, uncensored news, entertainment, language learning software. What if there was another way to give that to everyone on Earth for free?Enter Outernet."Surely there are bigger problems than people not using the internet. Yet alone something like this.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 04:39:46 pm
content: QuoteThe internet is not just Facebook and Twitter, you know.I can remember when acquiring a datasheet for some chip involved postal mail, a long wait, and book. Nowadays, I expect to be able to find not just a datasheet but tips and grumbles about the stuff, all withing a few minutes. You can't really appreciate what a huge step the internet has meant for information if you were born after about 1975. Blimey, just six feet behind my chair is a bookcase full of technical manuals, and the last time I actually took a book down is... well, I can't remember. It's just quicker to fire up Google, innit.So suppose you are not quite sure how to make your drinking water safe after some camel has shit in it. How do you find out when the only info to hand is what's in your head? That's the kind of thing that this crowdfunder is aimed at, not being able to use post on twatter that you're eating dinner or whatever.I can't understand how or why you think that aim is trivial. What is in question is the way these people have gone about it, but what they are trying to do is surely eminently laudable.

author: LukeW
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 04:59:44 pm
content: QuoteAnd all the satellites are equipped with little Guy Fawkes masks?They seem to be implying that there is going to be some sort of satellite socialist utopia where everything is free, anonymous, completely independent from any sort of government interference (up to and including an antisatellite missile?) and yet also connected to the Internet.Well, anybody can already access satellite Internet if they want it.But you need to sign up with the satellite ISP and pay for it, as well as installing appropriate hardware that doesn't fit in your pocket.Sure, you can build and launch a CubeSat or two, but you'll burn through $200,000 fairly quickly with a couple of those. And what sort of connectivity will they have, how will they be connected to the Internet? What sort of hardware will they have? Ku-band 12 GHz downlink on a CubeSat? Powered from what, with what transmit power?If you get "real" satellite Internet, which anybody can already get if they pay for it, you need to get the dish installed, which includes the low-noise blockconverter installed on the dish feed. This is the low-noise amplifier, plus a local oscillator and mixer to down-mix the microwave link from the satellite. This is then cabled out into the satellite modem plugged into your PC.OK, so they have designed their own little satellite modem hardware box? OK, that's plausible, although I doubt they have enough solar cells there to power it. But you still need a dish and a LNB - you can't just plonk down that box anywhere with no dish and expect to receive off a satellite with some sort of internal PCB antenna.And even if you've got a dish (and LNB) you can't just plonk the dish down. To talk to a geosynchronous satellite, the antenna has to be lined up with the right azimuth and elevation so it's pointed at the satellite. Tricky to do without appropriate equipment to help you "find" the satellite signal and figure out where it's supposed to point.I suppose it might be plausible to plug the IF output from the LNB (cheap surplus commercial off-the-shelf Ku-band TV satellite dish and LNB?) into one of those $20 DVB-T USB dongles and process it in software... this would potentially help solve the problem that the front-end amplifier in those dongles is pretty crap. Obviously they can't receive 12 GHz or so Ku-band, but it should actually be doable to tune in the 1-2 GHz or so IF at that output signal level.So, if you can make your own appropriate power supply for the LNB, with the right voltages to control the polarization switch etc, then I suppose you could use a surplus satellite TV dish/LNB, and a DVB-T dongle, and some simple electronics to receive unencrypted international satellite TV on your PC with open source hardware/software (partially open, not all of it) at relatively low cost.So that's possible, it is an interesting project in itself without making it implausible - but I think they're overhyping beyond things that are realistic.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 05:11:13 pm
content: They seem to be renting bandwidth on existing satellites.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 16, 2014, 05:13:03 pm
content: Quote from: NANDBlog on November 16, 2014, 09:37:18 amthose kids also don't have 'puters' so what are they going to do with the internet ....all we will see is more 419 scams.dear sir ia m theattorney for the recently deceased mrs kawibibibi who left 100.000000 , one hunderd million east zimbabwean ringgit in a bank account ... you know the drill

author: PointyOintment
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2014, 12:07:13 am
content: GPS works fine without a dish. Yes, the data rate is extremely low, but isn't that true of Lantern too?

author: matseng
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2014, 02:02:36 am
content: Quote from: PointyOintment on November 18, 2014, 12:07:13 amSat phones like the ones using the Iridium network are also managing without a dish, just a short chubby antenna and they must have at least decent data rates to be able to encode/decode voice into the datalink.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2014, 09:08:47 am
content: Quote...are probably not listening to cubesats but something with serious output concentrated on a specific footprint.

author: scatha
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2014, 10:03:04 am
content: Quote from: dunkemhigh on November 18, 2014, 09:08:47 amMaybe they can buy some capacity on MUOS?

author: matseng
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2014, 01:35:18 pm
content: Quote from: dunkemhigh on November 18, 2014, 09:08:47 amRight, just as the Lantern - no cubesats, just proper commercial satellites.

author: Sigmoid
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 20, 2014, 05:06:02 pm
content: I think it's kind of unfair to rip Outernet like this. Yes, it's naive, no, it's not particularly practical, but it's not a typical scam - and I definitely do see a point for its existence. One-way satellite broadcast pretty much created the idea of an "open world", and defeated most Stalinist dictatorships.In our current post-broadcast age, with Internet, content is increasingly controlled based on moral, political and legal grounds, and this control is vastly different across country borders.(Moral control in the US may mean censoring child pornography, while in a theocracy, it might mean censoring scientific facts, sociological studies or works of art deemed blasphemous.)With traditional, analog satellite broadcast, there was political motivation to share. Now there is a motivation to exclude - geographical IP filters abound, and are proliferating at a scary level. Even if a country doesn't have a Great Firewall, many sites will do their own due diligence in censoring content based on the whims of several prudish governments and oppressive dictatorships.So while yes, it's more of an art project than a practical solution, it's a worthwhile one. Kind of like Esperanto. I love Esperanto, even though the"fina venko"is obviously nothing but a pipe dream.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OuternetBTW...Quote from: free_electron on November 16, 2014, 05:13:03 pmYour view of Africa is kind of racist. By the way, most of Africa has GSM coverage - and thus, slow as it is, Internet access. It's a little known fact that GSM phones are THE MOST prevalent tool humans use, with the number of actively used cell phones on Earthoutnumberinghuman beings 1.5-2 to 1. Even in villages where it's the only piece of modern technology, there will usually be a cell phone.

author: miguelvp
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 20, 2014, 11:14:39 pm
content: I think it's like Voice of America was/is, but without the source fact checkingBut being independent from any given government, it might make their information more credible.