Welcome back to Space Security Challenge 2020,
The Final Frontier.
I'm your captain, Jordan.
I'm actually not anybody's captain,
but I can play one on YouTube.
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.
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.
So, Jasons, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Excellent, all right, that was Latimer on the right
and we got Jason Williams on the left.
Thanks for joining me, first of all.
I appreciate it.
You guys have been pretty busy, I know, the last few days
and, of course, even before that as well.
Just first, general impressions.
How are you feeling right now about how everything's going?
I think everything's going really well.
Sorry.
All right, I'll direct into one of you specifically
so I don't make you talk over yourself.
Latimer, how are you happy right now with things?
How are you feeling?
I'm happy.
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.
So, we're kind of sitting back and watching
and it's going pretty well today for sure.
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?
I already revealed, I think three was probably mine.
Do you have a favorite,
either one you worked on or one you didn't?
And if it's a later one, no spoilers, of course,
but feel free to tell us which one you like best.
Yeah, I really liked three a lot and I was super excited.
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.
Challenge four is going to be a challenge.
So, I'm hoping that we get some teams
that actually solve that this afternoon.
We're going to, you know, looking at when we give a hint
or two coming up, but yeah, I like challenge four.
I think you guys described to me
that four was probably,
would you say the hardest overall of all the challenges?
That was kind of the impression I got
from talking to the folks that made them all.
So, this is going to be important too.
Certainly for the score in the game,
a lot could happen in these last two solves.
So, this is going to be a big moment.
All right, so Jason Williams, same to you.
Do you have a favorite challenge?
Yeah, I think it's for me, it's going to be challenge four
without trying to give too much away.
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.
So, I'm really excited to see where they go with it.
And hopefully in the next hour or two,
we get a solve on this one.
Awesome.
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.
Jason Williams, just before we went live,
you were showing me one of the boards that you had there.
Do you want to go ahead and talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, so on the FlatSat,
we have our own hardware that we designed.
And it's actually, I'll try to show it to you
if you guys can see it here.
It consists of a carrier board
followed by two boards on top of it.
One of them is a ZX board,
which has on it an FPGA, an Artec 7 FPGA,
which runs two soft core processors.
Then the other one at the bottom here
is the Raspberry Pi Zero.
And this one is running the payload module.
Yes, yep.
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.
Well, hold on a second though, before we go, Jason,
that MSP430 soft core FPGA sounds a little familiar to me.
I think I see something behind your shoulder.
Was that related to that as well?
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.
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.
So we scored more points than that,
but I worked on that during the finals.
I remember that one.
Yeah, that's really cool.
A lot of the code is similar.
That makes sense.
Because you already had this sort of soft core
that you needed to implement
and it was compatible with what you do.
So that makes sense.
Awesome.
Now the Leon processor then, or the payload,
tell me a little bit more about that, Latimer.
What's involved in that one?
Yeah, so we used a Leon 3 soft core that Geissler developed.
It's all open source.
You can go out and get it.
You can go buy an Arctic 7 FPGA
and run your own Leon 3 on it.
And so it's a Spark processor that was developed
in conjunction with European Space Agency.
So this is legit the same kind of processes
that are utilized in space.
So that's why we picked it for the competition.
And then on top of that,
we're running a NASA product called Core Flight Software.
We picked that because
that's a really legitimate flight software.
NASA has been huge in the community
as far as releasing their flight software
that they are updating periodically.
And there's like a number of applications
that they have provided.
And so we use that as a basis.
And on top of that,
we've developed some custom applications
that actually interface with the hardware
that we're using in the game.
So that was our approach there.
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?
How much were off the shelf commercial components?
How much were there other vendors involved?
Like what was the sort of breakdown
of the overall system?
Yeah, so on the Flatsat itself,
there's really like two major components,
each with subcomponents.
We had kind of a short timeframe to develop all of this.
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.
So in order to do that,
we bought an off the shelf training satellite
that provides sun sensors.
It has an IMU.
It provides a gyro and magnetometers.
It has torque rods, just like a real satellite.
It has a reaction wheel, just like a real satellite.
So, you know, that's one of the primary components.
But that training satellite from a game perspective
wasn't really interesting.
It didn't really mimic, you know,
the kind of processors that are running
on like real satellites in space.
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.
So those are the two kind of primary components
on the flat sat.
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?
That's part of it.
Okay, all right.
Not gonna talk too much about that
cause the team still have some things to figure out there.
But, you know, the intent from the beginning
was to take a picture of the moon.
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.
And we put some interesting things in there
that the teams will soon find out about.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I don't think anyone is surprised.
They knew the end goal kind of going
and I've definitely seen some chatter from them.
So that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.
That's cool.
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.
So I didn't know a lot of these details.
When I first saw the air bearings in real life
and understood, oh wait, that's how that works.
That's what's happening.
That blew me away.
Can you talk a little bit more?
You've got one there.
Tell us about how that works and what's going on.
Yeah.
So the air bearing is like two precision pieces of aluminum.
It really works almost like an air hockey set.
Like we played with when we were kids.
Like a table hockey.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it has, you know, eight machines
or eight precision holes in it.
And you, you know, we hook an air compressor up to it.
We set it to 10 PSI or so.
And the top plate just floats on top of the air bearing
and the satellites are sitting on top of that.
A lot of work went into actually getting
that to work consistently.
And challenge two, we made the team's point
at the sun for an entire revolution.
And, you know, I've been playing with that for months.
Air compressor in my office running consistently.
So it was neat to see the teams do that too.
And we didn't make it easy for them.
So, so yeah, that's, that's essentially how it works.
Excellent.
Now, Jason Williams, how do you get air then
on a thing that's moving?
You have the carousel spinning around.
What was, I mean, was that like a thing that you designed
or built or bought or how did that work?
So the center of the carousel is not moving
and that's where we have the air hose come in.
And then we have it hooked up to a manifold
that distributes air to each of the teams
on the carousel itself.
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.
So we actually got that from China, had it shipped here.
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.
Awesome.
Well, thank you both for taking some time out
to discuss this.
This was awesome.
I'm sure the audience appreciates it.
We'll let you go back to the game and we'll see our audience
in another hour or so or next update.
Take care.
Thank you.
Thanks.