Design and Implementation of an Onboard Computer and payload for Nano Satellite (CubeSat)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Alexandria Higher Institute of Engineering & Technology AIET, Egypt.

2 EGSA.

10.21608/iugrc.2021.246386

Abstract

The satellite has many subsystems that require an onboard computer to organize and handle the data of satellite subsystems to send it to the ground station. The On-Board Computer (OBC) is the brain of the satellite. We designed and implemented an onboard computer for a CubeSat type of nanosatellites. The project can be divided into two virtual parts, satellite, and ground station. We used an ATmega328 microcontroller which acts as the onboard computer and sensors such as IMU, temperature, radar, BMS, and ESP32 CAM to act as satellite subsystems. The all-software code is run over a real-time operating system called FreeRTOS. FreeRTOS provides methods for multiple threads or tasks, mutexes, semaphores, and software timers. FreeRTOS, therefore, provides the core real-time scheduling functionality, inter-task communication, timing, and synchronization primitives only. This means it is more accurately described as a real-time kernel or real-time executive. We manufactured a 3D-printed CubeSat to house our onboard computer unit and fabricated a 3-layer PCB to shield our components.

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