York College was approached by the York County Astrological Society or YCAS with a task to create a fully operational radio telescope to be installed in John C Rudy park. A cohort team was created with over 20 students which involved mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer science majors, and one digital design major...me. While the others worked with the real world components, I was tasked with creating a virtual model which we could test our control software on. A student within the cohort started an early build of this project using Unity engine, so I continued the project and expanded the simulation.

A view of the mechanical model in Blender 3D. Blender was used to create and manipulate the models before they were brought into Unity.

The models were built with hyper sensitivity to the small mechanical components inside. The Unity engine would need to be able to recognize limit switches, gears, and motors in order to operate with realistic physics.

An exploded view of the dish and motor components

The following are images from the Unity engine. Notice the VRTK symbols as the project also supports VR functionality.

The components were also converted to .fbx models with simple animations so they could be viewed on the Microsoft Hololens.