OKCubeSat

For my Senior Design project, I was fortunate to work with six other engineers to contribute to the OKCubeSat initiative.

The OKCubeSat initiative is an ongoing Oklahoma State University program to develop and propose a CubeSat design to NASA. Our mission is to verify NASA’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) debris models, which would allow them to proceed to mitigation and removal planning.

Tyler Clayton and I were responsible for sorting through provided documentation, code, and datasheets, and we were tasks with beginning the development process for the flight software to be used on board.

Our scope ended up being system design, comprehensive documentation, and command loop simulation:

• Our system design required us to understand the logic flow of Real Time Operating Systems (RTOSes) and satellite flight software. Our deliverables primarily consisted of various UML diagrams and numerical justification for decisions made.
• The comprehensive documentation was an organization of resources given and found during research this semester. While not the flashiest deliverable, documentation is possibly the most important thing we created. Providing future teams with direction will save them several weeks worth of effort that we had to spend finding resources and deciphering sparse documentation.
• The command loop simulation was presented at the Senior Design Expo as a proof of concept of our system design. Using FreeRTOS with a POSIX environment, we were able to show that our system logic can function deterministically.

Overall, this project provided great hands-on experience in embedded systems coding practices, interdisciplinary communication, and thorough documentation.