Cicada is a poem-generator that uses satellite instrument readings to select words
for nonsense poems. The nonsense words were made up by Hugo Ball for his
poem, I zimbra. His intent was to reflect international harmony in 
words that all could speak, with no prejudice toward any existing spoken
language. The lyrics became the basis for a song by David Byrne and Brian Eno,
released as a single but also on the Talking Heads album, Fear of Music.
This choice of vocabulary seemed appropriate to the artist -- satellites
fly with no regard for national boundaries.

The poetry generator was loaded into a KickSat Sprite, and flew on the KickSat 2 mission.
Signal reception from Sprites was poor on that mission, and there were also
probable issues with Sprite release -- so it's unknown whether Cicada flew, and if
it did whether it sung.

The spacecraft software substrate for the poetry generator was originally provided for the
ARTSAT DESPATCH project. This was a sculpture that rode as secondary payload
on the launch of Hayabusa II, the second Japanese asteroid sample-return mission.
Reuse of DESPATCH code was  intended as mimetic homage to ARTSAT.

"Hayabusa" means "peregrine falcon." The name Cicada was chosen as a kind of mimetic
homage in itself. Falcons live for years. KickSat Sprites spend only a few days in orbit
before aerocapture and re-entry -- closer to the amount of time that cicadas fly after
years pupating underground. Falcons can be trained to fly and return with game. They
are capable of some degree of bonding with humans, and may speak in their own
way to humans as they exult in what freedom they are given even in bondage, and
in their predation on behalf of humans. Cicadas are useless except for the eerie
and nonhuman songs they sing, only for each other. They do not know what emotions
they stir in human beings.

The metaphor of pupation is also poetrically apropos for the development
of the Cicada mission. It was years after KickSat 1 was completed, and
flew Project Persephone code on the SpaceX CRS-3 mission. It was years after
KickSat 1's failed mission before KickSat 2 flew, in early 2018. It may be
years before the Cicada code flies again.

The code was sent to the KickSat mission organizer in late summer 2017,
while cicadas in Tokyo were still singing. 

Energia is a fork of Arduino for the Texas Instruments MSP430 Micro Controller. The Sprite picosatellite required
a fork of Energia for the CC430. This code is based on a branch of that fork, as well as the ARTSAT2 DESPATCH code,
aiming to be launched with KickSat 2.

For more information on the Sprite, see https://kicksat.github.io/

For more about ARTSAT DESPATCH, see http://artsat.jp/en/project/despatch

For more information on Energia, see the website at: http://energia.github.com/Energia/
and the https://github.com/energia/Energia To report a bug in Energia, go to:
https://github.com/energia/Energia/issues