The CAPE team was visited by Dr. Kumar Krishen the ST Senior Scientist / Lead Technologist for the Advanced Planning Office of NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas yesterday afternoon. Dr. Krishen gave a very enlightening presentation on the current problems NASA is working to solve, the need for new technologies in the aerospace field, and many other topics. The team is very grateful Dr. Krishen took time out of his day for us, and has learned a great deal. Thank you Dr. Krishen!

This is just to highlight some of the new features available on the website.  One of the more prominent features for our mobile users is the shiny new interface for iPhones, Blackberry’s and a few other mobile devices.  The mobile AJAXiness goodness comes from the guys at BraveNewCode.

Another feature for all of our users include the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post and any other news post.  This is the social web after all.  So, we at CAPE offer you, the reader the chance to spread some link love with all of your friends real or not.  There are also options for saving to PDF and printing in the lineup as well.

Some of you may have noticed the little snippet above has been around for a while now.  Unfortunately our feedburner was not actually configured to allow email subscriptions so entering your email address just led to an error screen (shame on us). Fortunately, the situation has been rectified with a few simple steps you can subscribe to updates from our website.  You will receive an email anytime a new post is made to the website, but never more than one email a day.  So feel free to enter your email address, sign up and stay up to date.  The email subscription is ran by Google’s FeedBurner and CAPE will not have access to your email address to send you anything including spam. You will just have to trust Google to not be evil.

Lastly, there has been some work done on the wiki side of our website as well. There is no screenshot because it is in nowhere near it’s final state as far as looks are concerned.  However, the behind the scenes foundation is being laid to integrate the wiki (at least visually) with the main site you are viewing now.  Also, much of the important content has been ported over by Wade and myself including the PIC tutorials that were so popular.  All in all, the website is slowly progressing to a unified tool for CAPE to reach the public with.

That just about covers the changes around the website.  Just be sure to check out the photo gallery for some new (well, old) photos from the CAPE team circa 2004.  In the next couple days there should be some more albums from the CAPE-1 days as well.

Just thought i’d link the concept videos of the CAPE Mechanical Design, created by our Mechanical team:

An Exploded view and assembly of the CAPE-2 Satellite.

Experimental Video of including Deployable Solar Panels on CAPE-2

Keep on the look out for more videos in the coming days!

-Rizwan Merchant

Recently members of the CAPE team traveled to San Luis Obispo, California to visit the California Polytechnic State and attend the 6th Annual Cubesat Developer’s Workshop. The group consisted of Matthew Barousse, Trey Olivier, Taylor Maronge, Dustin Meyers, Rizwan Merchant and Nick Pugh.  The trip was a great success, and a lot was accompliced from Matt and Trey’s presentation on the Applications of a Software Defined Radio in Space, and the amount of knowledge the team as a whole learned from the different teams in attendence.  Below are some photos taken at the conference, and trip in general.

Matt and Trey presenting their presentation.

Group Photo of the CAPE team at CalPoly. Left to right: Trey Oliver, Rizwan Merchant, Taylor Maronge,  Matthew Barousse, Dustin Meyer, Nick Pugh

Picture of us driving down the coastline back to Los Angeles after the conference.

On behalf of the C.A.P.E., I would like to thank the Calpoly team for an awesome conference, and hope to see them next year for the 7th Annual Cubesat Developer’s Workshop!

-Rizwan Merchant

Today, Chris Mancuso, and myself (Rizwan Merchant) accompanied Mr. Darby from the Electrical Engineering Department of ULL to give a presentation to The Louisiana School for Math, Science & the Arts, located in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The topic of the presentation was CAPE and the other student projects in the Electrical Engineering Department.  Below are a few photos we took of the presentation.