Top Projects
REGULAR
‘
Project Arthur
ornwall’s Goonhilly Earth Satellite Station, and
the iconic Arthur satellite dish, brought Britain
into the space age. It enabled transatlantic
broadcasts for the first time, carrying pictures of
Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon on 21 July
from NASA to Europe, with a global audience of
around 600 million, and modernised communications with the rest
of the world.
‘Project Arthur’ was created after a visit to Goonhilly
Earth Station in Cornwall to discuss an event celebrating the
50th anniversary of the moon landing. The visit came just after the
paper engineering issue of HackSpace magazine, which inspired
me to have a go at creating the model.
Being a fan of the Pi, I wanted to make the model interact
with something, so I found an applet on IFTTT that posts a tweet
when the ISS is over a specified latitude and longitude. The Pi
then listens for the tweet, and flashes the LED when it’s over
your location. I have also included an audio snippet of the moon
landings’ radio transmissions on GitHub, that I would like the
model to play via a Speaker pHAT too, but haven’t found the
time yet. The paper templates, code, and tutorial can be found
at apollo50.co.uk.C
By Alec Short apollo50.co.ukRight
The real Goonhilly
station
Credit
g6lvb.com