Meet Vinícius and Simon, young hackers from Youth Hacking 4 Freedom

Vinícius: My name is Vinícius Carrijo Tambascia and I’m 17 years old. I was born in Brazil and moved to Sweden at the age of 10. My hobbies are looking at the stars with the telescope, playing tennis and skateboard when the weather is good, and also to make projects with software and hardware.

Simon: My name is Simon. I am 15 years old living in Germany. My hobbies are swimming and programming.

Simon: I started to learn programming during COVID, when I bought myself a Raspberry Pi 4 and began experimenting with Arch Linux ARM. For me, Free Software was there from the beginning. I tried to compile obscure programs that only met one requirement, but by fixing bugs and reading their code, I gained a lot of experience and knowledge about programming

Vinícius: My first experience with programming was with a Free Software website called Scratch. Scratch allows you to make games and animations using blocks as code. It’s relatively easy to use and it teaches the concept of programming.

Vinícius: I first heard about this competition from my parents' friends. I got interested in this competition because I never did anything like this before and I also wanted to challenge my skills to see what I could learn and achieve.

Simon: I joined YH4F last year because it was the only competition in which you could do whatever you want, and it was also one of the few competitions where younger people could participate.

Vinícius: A month before joining this competition, I got a small telescope from my grandparents. I started using it a lot but I did have issues trying to point at a star that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. I knew this problem would be solved with an automatic telescope but they are much more expensive. Therefore I thought I could make my own automatic telescope for this competition. Before coming to this final idea, I had thought of many other options such as games, automatic watering systems for plants, and remote control planes.

Vinícius: I always had a certain level of interest in astronomy but it wasn’t a long standing passion. The telescope helped me to gain even more interest in astronomy.

Simon: I received these devices from a relative, who switched to a different smart home system after the shutdown of the the one they were using. So I tried to get them up and running in offline mode but the encryption keys, used for pairing and communicating with the end devices, were not saved from the previous owner.

Simon: The main goal of my project is to get end devices to use an open standard for communicating. Additionally, I want to release all software that I write for them so that if I lose interest or they break, other people can try to fix any issues/bugs still present in the software.

Vinícius: I had problems throughout the whole process of making the project. I started by making the hardware and the mechanical part of the telescope. I spent a lot of time coming up with ideas on how to move the telescope and all of my original ideas didn’t work. Halfway through the competition I managed to move the telescope up and down by itself using a system that involved a rope and a motor. The next part was to make the telescope move horizontally by itself, however this part was much more challenging. I tried so many different ways but nothing worked until the end of May. By then I actually had a telescope with all the mechanics and hardware working but the problem was that I had less than a month for the actual coding period. Time management was a big problem here because I spent a lot of time on the building phase and little on the programming one. During the programming phase, I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I wanted to connect the Arduino [board] to astronomy software (like Google Maps but for stars) to get the live coordinates of the star you want to track, however I simply didn't know how to do that. I tried but got nowhere. Instead I came up with an idea to track the stars using a bunch of mathematical equations that model the trajectory of the stars.

Simon: Mainly, learning how Linux works under the hood, especially building my own "OS" using build-root, was a significant challenge. Another big problem was that missing documentation for the hardware, which meant that I had to figure out all connections to other peripherals on my own.

Simon: Yes, I worked on it alone.

Vinícius: I did work on my project alone but I had some help. My school helped me with the project by allowing me to use their 3D printer machine. I could have not done the project without a 3D printer. I also had some indirect help from my parents' friends as we discussed ideas for building the telescope.

Vinícius: I tracked the path of the start by coming up with equations that could model the star based on its current position. The path of the star around the sky is mainly caused by the Earth's rotation around its axis and the sun. This is only true for the stars very far away unlike the planets in our solar system.

Simon: The biggest challenge is figuring out how the hardware is connected with one another and then adjusting the software to fit the hardware.

Vinícius: Working on this project has helped me to develop my coding skills, but most importantly it has shown me that I can do more complicated projects than I originally thought. At the beginning of the project, I doubted myself that I could do something so advanced, but in the end, I realised that anything is possible with a lot of dedication and effort. Nothing goes according to plan, but we can still go around it and reach the goal.

Simon: I discovered that there are many people like me that love to tinker with electronics and software.

Simon: I will definitely continue to work on this project, but I will probably stop developing the Linux port because the hardware in the central devices is very slow and has no real use any more. However, the next step will be to design custom PCBs for the end devices and use ESP32s to create a replacement board that uses Zigbee, an open standard, instead of the closed standard they have used so far. Another reason for switching to Zigbee is that I recently switched to Zigbee for my home automation and don't want multiple different communication standards that may not work after 10 years. I will definitely document the process for developing the new PCBs and also share other information I still have for the central devices.

Vinícius: Time management is very important. If you're thinking of making a project that involves hardware, then make sure that the building period doesn’t take all of your time because the main focus of this competition is the software. I believe I could have made better software if I had spent less time on the building part and more on the programming part.

Simon: I think you should always just try to do your best. Even if you don't win, you will still make friends and have fun in the process.