Projects01 of 04
CanSat Hungary
A satellite the size of a soda can. Sensors, radio and a recovery mechanism in a Ø66 × 115 mm cylinder, sending telemetry the whole way down.
CanSat Hungary
ZeroSat V2.
Our 2025-26 CanSat: a whole satellite in the volume of a soda can. Watch it come apart.
01 / 04
First, the can.
This is prototype v2. Every structural part was printed together in PLA - 4 hours 36 minutes for the lot.
02 / 04
Three boards. Stacked.
Main, comms and camera. All three designed by us, stacked on standoffs like a very small layer cake.
03 / 04
Holds together. Mostly.
Camera mount at the bottom, battery holder above it, a board mount on top, and two side arms bracing the stack.
04 / 04
Every part has a job.
CO₂, UV, temperature, pressure, humidity, motion, GPS, a camera - and LoRa to phone home.
- Lid
- printed PLA
- Main board
- ESP32, CO₂, UV, T/P/RH, IMU
- Comms board
- LoRa radio, GPS
- Camera board
- camera MCU, image SD card
- Board mount
- Side arms
- Battery holder
- Camera mount
- looks straight down
Overview
The competition rules give you a cylinder 66 mm across and 115 mm tall. Everything goes inside: power, sensors, radio, and the recovery mechanism that has exactly one chance to work.
The firmware samples an IMU, a barometric pressure sensor and GPS, timestamps every reading, frames it with a CRC and pushes it down a 433 MHz link at 9.6 kbps. On the ground a Python decoder plots altitude, temperature and acceleration as the packets arrive, and can replay a recorded session afterwards.
Most of the difficulty is not the happy path. Radios drop packets, GPS cold starts take minutes, and a servo that jams at apogee ends the flight. So the interesting code is the part that notices.
Notes
- CRC-16 and sequence numbers on every frame, so a lost packet shows up as a gap instead of a plausible-looking wrong number.
- No floating point in the sampling loop. Fixed-point conversion happens on the ground where cycles are free.
- Ground decoder doubles as a replay tool, which is how most bugs actually get found.