FieldSatSoftware

There are two separate components to the FieldSat software. One is the simple program that runs on the microcontroller during flight. The other is the collection of tools that will analyze the data collected by the satellite. This is mainly being handled by David Fifield.

All of the source code is available.

On-board programming

This will be written in C for the ATmega32 microcontroller, using GCC and AVR Libc. I have these development tools installed and have used them to compile the unicycle program in the links below.

System requirements for on-board programming

The way I see it, the on-board software has to do these things:

• Receive data from the analog-to-digital converters and write it to the SD cards.
• Detect when to deploy the solar panels and deploy them.
• Turn the heating elements on and off according to temperature.

Status

The on-board software's primary purpose is complete. It reads signals from the analog-to-digital converters and writes them out to an SD card using a special data format. It can also output to the serial port for a live display.

I need to make it write to both SD cards, once we get parts in.

Source code

You can get the source sode with GNU Arch. Just do

tla register-archive http://www.bamsoftware.com/archive
tla get fieldsat--main

Post-flight analysis

I've written a visualization program that shows the 3D orientation of the payload over time.

I would really like to be able to make a graph showing the actual path our satellite took, perhaps overlaid on a map.

It will be nice to filter the raw data to reduce the noise and drift. I think the right way to do this is with a Kalman filter. I need to learn more about how these work. Another link is http://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/kalman/.

Links

• The electric unicycle. A project using a similar Atmel microcontroller, with source code.
• MMC writing with SPI.