Amateur-Built CubeSat KENSAT to Run TinyLlama AI Model in Low Earth Orbit

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Engineer Ken Chan has built a 2U CubeSat called KENSAT in his home lab, designed to run a quantized TinyLlama large language model directly in low Earth orbit using an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Rather than sending raw sensor data to Earth for processing, the satellite performs AI inference onboard and transmits only the final results. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch this fall and features custom-built power, radio, and antenna systems managed by a dedicated flight computer. To conserve power in the energy-scarce space environment, the Jetson processor is kept powered down and only activated during scheduled windows, with watchdog circuits and fault-tolerant state machines ensuring reliability. The entire project is open source, with schematics, firmware, and ground-station software publicly available on GitHub, and its UHF downlink can be received by amateur radio operators worldwide.

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