Satellite Subsystems » Flight Computer » Introduction

The Flight Computer (FC) aboard BLUEsat is essentially the brain of the entire satellite. It interfaces with and controls all other subsystems (even power management to some degree). Once considered part of the Electrical subsystem, the vital and complex role played by the FC has made it a subsystem in itself. The FC is a core component, and necessary in a satellite providing more than trivial capabilities. Some of its responsibilities include:

• Monitoring power consumption and throttling its own usage (through clock frequency scaling), and adjusting transmitter power levels as necessary to keep the batteries at a desired level
• Collecting various data from telemetry nodes such as currents, voltages and temperatures around various parts of the satellite, bundling them into a telemetry packet and streaming this down to earth
• Providing Amateur packet store-and-forward capabilities to the amateur HAM radio community
• Controlling the onboard payloads, initiating experiments, processing data and providing storage (for example timing the imager to take an image as the satellite rotates into correct orientation, compressing it as desired, and storing it for later download)

Furthermore, the FC itself is flexible enough for us to try various software experiments while maintaining control of the satellite at all times.

The development of the FC consists of two components, seemingly simple at a glance, but incredibly complex to accomplish when attempted:

1. Hardware design, construction and testing
2. Software, which can be further broken down into:
   1. The Bootloader - to ensure the brains of the satellite stays alive in any event,
   2. The Operating System - which orchestrates all the processes being juggled by the CPU at the same time,
   3. The System Software - each of which performs a specific task

	Author: Vaenthan Thiru © The Author, the BLUEsat project or UNSW. All rights reserved. Last Modified: May 18 2006 08:39:02.