Flight Software and Systems Documentation

This section of the documentation contains documentation on both the flight software and the PAN satellite’s subsystem architectures. The two ideas go hand-in-hand, which is why their documentation is woven together. This section is primarily meant to be design documentation, although there is some user documentation as well.

Installing Flight Software

The code for flight software is available here. Follow the instructions in the README under ptest to set up the code for development and testing.

FlightSoftware is dependent on a build system called PlatformIO. See Flight Software Build System to see how this system is set up for our use.

Structure of Flight Software Repository and Documentation

This repository is very monolithic and actually contains three separate products:

• FlightSoftware, which runs on the Flight Controller of our spacecraft

• ADCSSoftware, which runs on the Attitude Control subsystem of our spacecraft

• PTest, a hardware-out-of-the-loop (HOOTL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testing platform designed to provide mission-fidelity testing.

Unless otherwise specified, this documentation talks about the design of Flight Software, not the other platforms. Documentation for ADCSSoftware may be forthcoming, but for now it suffices to know that it exists to service the hardware described in Attitude Determination and Control. However, because PTest is an extensive platform that is still being heavily developed, we are producing good documentation for it here (see the table of contents below.)

Contents:

• Flight Software Components
  • Control Tasks
  • State Fields
  • Faults
  • The State Field Registry
  • Flight Software Cycle
  • Debug Console
• Desktop Operation of Flight Software
  • Pros and Cons
  • Implementation Differences
• Serializers
  • Boolean Serializer
  • Integer Serializer
  • GPS Time Serializer
  • Quaternion Serializer
  • Vector Serializer
• Flight Software Build System
• Mission Management
  • Nominal Mission Management
• Fault Management
  • Fault Detection
  • Fault Response
• Flight Software Subsystems
  • Persistent State
  • Power Management
  • Attitude Determination and Control
  • Propulsion System Management
  • Guidance, Navigation, and Control
  • Telemetry Management
  • The Radio Manager
  • Docking System
  • GPS Receiver
• PTest Documentation
  • PTest Software Stack
  • PTest Cases