MIST

I am a supervisor in the MIniature Student saTellite (MIST) project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a project that aims to build and launch a Cubesat satellite into space. I develop software in C for the ISIS On-board Computer (iOBC), that runs FreeRTOS and interacts with a number of subsystems such as an Electrical Power System (EPS) and the Radio (TRXVU) providing communication with the ground station, using serial protocols such as I2C and SPI.

I have also been involved with developing the Telecommand and Telemetry interface between the iOBC and ground station, which uses the AX.25 and CCSDS protocols, and various extensions to the Mission Control System (MCS) written in C#.

We are using an extended version of the QEMU emulator that supports the iOBC board, developed by KSat e. V. at the university of Stuttgart, in combination with a set of Arduino subsystem simulators and stubs of the iOBC hardware abstraction layer (libHAL.a) developed as a part of MIST. This setup allows us to run automated unit tests on the on-board software, and also run and test it manually with the MCS using a compatability layer that translates AX.25 frames sent by the MCS into ASCII commands that are interpreted by a FreeRTOS task in the on-board software that injects them into the Radio (TRXVU) simulator.

Most of the software we have developed can be found on our Gitlab.