A 48g solar powered Iridium 9603N + GNSS Beacon (Tracker)
Suitable for high altitude ballooning, asset tracking and many other remote monitoring applications.
The beacon can be powered by two PowerFilm Solar MPT3.6-150 solar panels. It can also be powered via USB becoming an extremely small Iridium Beacon Base which you can use to track other beacons from anywhere.
The Iridium 9603N and u-blox MAX-M8Q GNSS share a single antenna. Antenna switching is performed by a Skyworks AS179-92LF RF Switch.
See LEARN.md for more details.
See ASSEMBLY.md for details on how to assemble the PCB.
See Iridium_9603N_Solar_Beacon.pdf for the schematic, layout and Bill Of Materials.
The Eagle directory contains the schematic and pcb design files.
The Arduino directory contains the Arduino code.
The OpenSCAD directory contains the .stl and .scad files for the 3D-printed cover and antenna spacer.
Please refer to the Iridium_9603_Beacon Repo for details on how to track your beacon via the RockBLOCK Gateway with or without an Internet connection. If you are configuring the Solar Beacon as a Base, please make sure you use the version of the Base code included in this Repo as the solar beacon pin definitions are slightly different and the code needs to ensure the 9603N and MAX-M8Q are not powered up simultaneously when sharing the antenna.
If you have found this project useful and if you are able to, please cite the paper:
P. Clark et al, An open source toolkit for the tracking, termination and recovery of high altitude balloon flights and payloads, 2019 JINST 14 P04003 DOI:10.1088/1748-0221/14/04/P04003
The Accepted Manuscript is available on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04321
This project is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution + Share-alike (BY-SA) licence. Please refer to section 5 of the licence for the "Disclaimer of Warranties and Limitation of Liability".
Enjoy!
Paul