Kicksat had a watchdog timer reset which apparently also resets the 16 day timer for releasing all the kicksats. Unfortunately this pushes the release time past when the kicksat would re-enter. They made a poor design decision linking the release time to the watchdog timer with no way of syncing the time otherwise.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zacinaction/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space/posts/831509
I must not understand something about their system design but how did they not account for this scenario? The whole point of a watchdog is the realization that no matter how good and robust your system, it can still get into a state where it is unrecoverable or locked and a restart is needed. By having a watchdog they acknowledge that the system could potentially restart, so why was the single step connection not made that a restart would also be resetting the release timer? Unless the plan was to use the uplink to appropriately set the timer in the unlikely event of a restart.
I'm sure this is a gross oversimplification of the problem and I don't want to criticize the work of a cool project but I am just trying to look at it from a systems engineering perspective.
There is a Kicksat Sprites thread for this discussion.
This is the CRS-3 Dragon mission thread.
Edit/Lar: Don't moderate, just use the report button. But if you must comment, give a pointer to the thread with a link, don't just claim one exists. And this is the payloads thread not the mission thread.
Live from the Space Station: Unpacking OPALS
Streamed live on May 1, 2014
Watch live from the International Space Station as JPL's OPALS lasercomm instrument is unpacked from the Dragon spacecraft by a robotic arm.
OPALS, the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science, is a technology demonstration that will beam HD video from space to Earth via laser light.
new material 2:40 into video.
ScienceCasts: A Laser Message from Space: "Hello World"
In early June, a laser beam lanced out of the night sky over California, heralding a breakthrough in space communications. The message it carried was "Hello, World."