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Welcome back to Space Security Challenge 2020, The Final Frontier.

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I'm your captain, Jordan.

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I'm actually not anybody's captain, but I can play one on YouTube.

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With no game changes to report on in the last hour and the game infrastructure cooled down to a less than molten state, as things are a steady state, we're gonna bring in some of the game organizers to talk a little bit more about the behind the scenes and the game infrastructure.

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We were gonna call this segment Between Two Jasons because we've got Jason Williams and Jason Latimer of Chromulence on the video chat, but I don't think y'all need to see my face.

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So, Jasons, can you hear me?

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Yeah, I can hear you.

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Excellent, all right, that was Latimer on the right and we got Jason Williams on the left.

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Thanks for joining me, first of all.

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I appreciate it.

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You guys have been pretty busy, I know, the last few days and, of course, even before that as well.

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Just first, general impressions.

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How are you feeling right now about how everything's going?

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I think everything's going really well.

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Sorry.

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All right, I'll direct into one of you specifically so I don't make you talk over yourself.

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Latimer, how are you happy right now with things?

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How are you feeling?

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I'm happy.

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We've had a little bit of a lull as teams have been working on challenge three and four, which are the harder challenges from the hacking perspective.

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So, we're kind of sitting back and watching and it's going pretty well today for sure.

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So, one of my other questions for you each, and we'll stick with Latimer since you're going, was what is your favorite challenge then?

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I already revealed, I think three was probably mine.

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Do you have a favorite, either one you worked on or one you didn't?

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And if it's a later one, no spoilers, of course, but feel free to tell us which one you like best.

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Yeah, I really liked three a lot and I was super excited.

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We gave the team something to work on overnight and to come back in this morning and have a couple of solves right away, that was awesome.

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Challenge four is going to be a challenge.

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So, I'm hoping that we get some teams that actually solve that this afternoon.

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We're going to, you know, looking at when we give a hint or two coming up, but yeah, I like challenge four.

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I think you guys described to me that four was probably, would you say the hardest overall of all the challenges?

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That was kind of the impression I got from talking to the folks that made them all.

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So, this is going to be important too.

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Certainly for the score in the game, a lot could happen in these last two solves.

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So, this is going to be a big moment.

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All right, so Jason Williams, same to you.

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Do you have a favorite challenge?

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Yeah, I think it's for me, it's going to be challenge four without trying to give too much away.

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As you know, we think this is the hardest challenge in the game and it exercises a lot of skills that the teams are going to need to use in order for them to solve this challenge.

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So, I'm really excited to see where they go with it.

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And hopefully in the next hour or two, we get a solve on this one.

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Awesome.

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Now, I think you each may have some components of some of these FlatSats that we can see kind of up close and maybe talk a little bit more.

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Jason Williams, just before we went live, you were showing me one of the boards that you had there.

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Do you want to go ahead and talk about that a little bit?

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Yeah, so on the FlatSat, we have our own hardware that we designed.

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And it's actually, I'll try to show it to you if you guys can see it here.

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It consists of a carrier board followed by two boards on top of it.

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One of them is a ZX board, which has on it an FPGA, an Artec 7 FPGA, which runs two soft core processors.

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Then the other one at the bottom here is the Raspberry Pi Zero.

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And this one is running the payload module.

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Yes, yep.

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And so here you can see the ZX board and on there is actually two soft core processor, an MSP430, which we use for running the radio baseband, and then a Leon 3 processor from Geissler, which Jason can talk more about that runs our flight software.

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Well, hold on a second though, before we go, Jason, that MSP430 soft core FPGA sounds a little familiar to me.

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I think I see something behind your shoulder.

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Was that related to that as well?

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Yes, if you can remember the badge service from 2013 DEF CON, it's actually the same soft core processor that was used for that competition.

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Yeah, Badger was the name of the challenge and I remember working on it and we kind of had an almost solution and then my team threw our broken solution and then another team fixed it and got it right.

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So we scored more points than that, but I worked on that during the finals.

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I remember that one.

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Yeah, that's really cool.

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A lot of the code is similar.

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That makes sense.

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Because you already had this sort of soft core that you needed to implement and it was compatible with what you do.

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So that makes sense.

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Awesome.

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Now the Leon processor then, or the payload, tell me a little bit more about that, Latimer.

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What's involved in that one?

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Yeah, so we used a Leon 3 soft core that Geissler developed.

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It's all open source.

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You can go out and get it.

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You can go buy an Arctic 7 FPGA and run your own Leon 3 on it.

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And so it's a Spark processor that was developed in conjunction with European Space Agency.

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So this is legit the same kind of processes that are utilized in space.

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So that's why we picked it for the competition.

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And then on top of that, we're running a NASA product called Core Flight Software.

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We picked that because that's a really legitimate flight software.

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NASA has been huge in the community as far as releasing their flight software that they are updating periodically.

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And there's like a number of applications that they have provided.

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And so we use that as a basis.

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And on top of that, we've developed some custom applications that actually interface with the hardware that we're using in the game.

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So that was our approach there.

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Now Latimer, how much would you say of like the overall system that you've got from the case to the boards, to the payload, all the different modules that are, how much did you develop?

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How much were off the shelf commercial components?

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How much were there other vendors involved?

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Like what was the sort of breakdown of the overall system?

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Yeah, so on the Flatsat itself, there's really like two major components, each with subcomponents.

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We had kind of a short timeframe to develop all of this.

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So when we met, you know, starting, we were talking more details in November of last year, we decided we need something quick that we can do to get sensors and actuators.

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So in order to do that, we bought an off the shelf training satellite that provides sun sensors.

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It has an IMU.

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It provides a gyro and magnetometers.

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It has torque rods, just like a real satellite.

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It has a reaction wheel, just like a real satellite.

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So, you know, that's one of the primary components.

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But that training satellite from a game perspective wasn't really interesting.

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It didn't really mimic, you know, the kind of processors that are running on like real satellites in space.

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So that's where we came up with the CNVH board that we developed that has, you know, that Arctic 7 and the Raspberry Pi.

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So those are the two kind of primary components on the flat sat.

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And is that where most of the sort of the game occurs, you know, where the challenge is people interacting and except is the payload module then a part of that or that I know we're gonna, maybe that's coming a little bit later, but like, where is that gonna get factored in?

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That's part of it.

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Okay, all right.

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Not gonna talk too much about that cause the team still have some things to figure out there.

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But, you know, the intent from the beginning was to take a picture of the moon.

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We've been telling the teams that, so the Pi is there really to provide an interface to the camera to allow them to do that.

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And we put some interesting things in there that the teams will soon find out about.

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Yeah, that makes sense.

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And I don't think anyone is surprised.

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They knew the end goal kind of going and I've definitely seen some chatter from them.

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So that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

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That's cool.

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One of the other things I, you know, I've been hearing a lot about this stuff, but I was involved in a lot of production side.

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So I didn't know a lot of these details.

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When I first saw the air bearings in real life and understood, oh wait, that's how that works.

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That's what's happening.

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That blew me away.

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Can you talk a little bit more?

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You've got one there.

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Tell us about how that works and what's going on.

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Yeah.

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So the air bearing is like two precision pieces of aluminum.

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It really works almost like an air hockey set.

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Like we played with when we were kids.

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Like a table hockey.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So it has, you know, eight machines or eight precision holes in it.

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And you, you know, we hook an air compressor up to it.

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We set it to 10 PSI or so.

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And the top plate just floats on top of the air bearing and the satellites are sitting on top of that.

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A lot of work went into actually getting that to work consistently.

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And challenge two, we made the team's point at the sun for an entire revolution.

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And , you know, I've been playing with that for months.

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Air compressor in my office running consistently.

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So it was neat to see the teams do that too.

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And we didn't make it easy for them.

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So, so yeah, that's, that's essentially how it works.

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Excellent.

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Now, Jason Williams, how do you get air then on a thing that's moving?

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You have the carousel spinning around.

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What was, I mean, was that like a thing that you designed or built or bought or how did that work?

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So the center of the carousel is not moving and that's where we have the air hose come in.

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And then we have it hooked up to a manifold that distributes air to each of the teams on the carousel itself.

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And an interesting thing about the carousel is actually it's driven off of a slew drive, which is somebody if you're familiar with a solar tracking arrays the slew drives, what causes this solar tracking arrays to track the sun.

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So we actually got that from China, had it shipped here.

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It was kind of difficult to get but that's what the centerpiece you see in the room there that's rotating the carousel about 15 minutes rotation per sorry, 15 minutes per a single rotation.

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Awesome.

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Well, thank you both for taking some time out to discuss this.

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This was awesome.

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I'm sure the audience appreciates it.

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We'll let you go back to the game and we'll see our audience in another hour or so or next update.

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Take care.

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Thank you.

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Thanks.