The Flight Computer (FC)'s hardware has to be specially constructed to deal with the rigours of space. Digital logic is adversely affected by stray cosmic particles, and many components used in terrestrial circuitry just don't work in space; they explode or evaporate. Furthermore commercial space-grade computers are several generations behind in processing power (to maintain their space hardness) and cost an arm and two legs. Thus the need for us to design and construct our own FC.

In line with the experimental nature of BLUEsat, we have decided to construct our FC based around the Intel StrongARM SA-1100 microprocessor (formerly manufactured by Digital Semiconductor, bought and subsequently superceded by Intel). Several reasons influenced this decision, among them:

• It's selection for the IHU-2 board of the AMSAT P3D satellite,
• The astoundingly low power consumption (less than a watt),
• The high processing power (up to 200 MIPS) at this power,
• The abundance of IO connection options, and
• The experience with using the SA-1100 in UNSW; the PLEB portable Linux computer, designed and built at CSE, uses this CPU.

In fact, if you own a PDA purchased sometime a year ago, chances are it's running the same CPU, for the same MIPS-to-power-consumption quality.

The BLUEsat FC, yet to be named, has a PCB roughly the same size as a face of the satellite, and sits in tray 3 all by itself. It has interfaces to all the other systems aboard the satellite, and contains a significant amount of memory when talking satellites. The first prototype was built around January 2004. Development of revision 2 commenced July 2005, manufactured and populated late 2005.