Back in 2020, students from Universidad Del Valle De Guatemala (UVG) pulled off a really impressive feat, designing and building a CubeSat that lasted a whopping 211 days in orbit. In addition to telemetry and radio equipment, it carried a black-and-white camera payload.

But it turns out space is hard. The first pictures were solid black or white, with the automatic exposure process failing pretty badly. A pair of good pictures were taken by waiting until the satellite was passing over Guatemala during sunrise or sunset. A hung I2C bus led to battery drain, and the team tried a system reset to clear the hung state. Sadly the craft never came back to life after the reset, likely because of one of the Lithium-Ion battery cells failed completely in the low charge state.

That was 2020, so why are we covering it now? Because the project just released a massive trove of open source design documents, the software that ran on the satellite and ground station, and all the captured telemetry from the flight. It’s the ultimate bootstrap for anyone