Electronics design and testing for ESTCube-2 on-board computer system with sensors for attitude determination

Abstract

ESTCube-2 will be a 3U picosatellite planned to launch in 2019 to perform experiments in low Earth orbit. On-board computer system is required to control the satellite while powered up and has to provide computational power and reliable storage for other subsystems. Attitude and orbit control system is responsible for satellite’s detumbling, pointing, spin-up and for controlling thrusters. This thesis presents a prototype electronics board developed for both systems. On-board computer system features STMicroelectronics Cortex-M7 microcontroller with common bus interfaces and point-to-point signaling lines for all other systems planned for ESTCube-2. Data and programs are stored in three types of external non-volatile memories - QSPI NOR flash, FRAM and MRAM. For attitude determination sensors a dedicated connector and a demonstration prototype expansion board were developed featuring magnetometer, accelerometer and two gyroscopes. To test the developed boards simple firmware was written using manufacturer’s provided hardware abstraction layer and an initialization source code generator.