[Ground-station] 31 May 2018 IHU Meeting Minutes

[Robert McGwier]

My apologies to all for not being able to attend the meeting.    This is a
very useful endeavor.    For various family reasons, I was unable to
participate in almost anything for over a week.  The worst of them will end
tomorrow when I attend the funeral for my favorite Uncle in Lebanon, TN.

I am definitely interested in participating in these discussions.

Bob
N4HY

On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 11:54 AM, Michelle Thompson via Ground-Station <
ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> A conference call was held on 31 May 2018. Presenting was Jonathan
> Brandenburg, concerning his IHU project that he wishes to publish.
>
> Open Research Institute will support publishing this open source
> Integrated Housekeeping Unit (IHU) design intended for amateur radio
> satellite service payloads. An IHU is a flight computer, controlling all
> the elements of the payload.
>
> The call was held courtesy of National Instruments conference bridge.
> Thank you to Neel Pandeya for making it possible and for supporting open
> source hardware and software designs.
>
> The design team for this IHU consists of Zach Metzinger, Jordan Trewitt,
> Bill Reed, and Jonathan Brandenburg. This started in earnest about a year
> ago. It it not radiation hardened by design, but is entirely appropriate
> for low earth orbit (LEO) use.
>
> Initial design work was presented at the 2017 AMSAT Symposium.
> This is a failover IHU design. It was two fault-tolerant processors. The
> processor is TI Hercules and the part number is TMS570LS0914PGE. Each
> processor has two cores, and each core operates in lock-step. There is some
> flight heritage with this part from the ICI Radar Satellite and a NASA
> Robotic ARM.
>
> Included in the design are twin transceivers. The transceiver selected is
> the AX5043.
>
> A power amplifier design is in progress.
> There is error correction on the memories.
> This IHU has two “sides”, with one Hercules and one transceiver on each
> side. There is diversity in the voltage regulators, with the primary side
> powered by a MAX1556A regulators and a secondary side powered with
> LTI963As. The diversity in voltage regulators is intended to provide
> additional resilience. For each side, there is a 3.3volt rail and a 1.2volt
> rail.
>
> Software development has only just begun. Layout is approximately 80%
> complete.
>
> The board has 4 layers and relatively good power consumption based on
> prototype measurement.
>
> UPSat from Libre Space was also introduced and referenced.
>
> OreSat is interested in collaborating and learning more about this design.
>
> Our consensus is CANbus or Ethernet for flight hardware.
>
> Jonathan has also made a Raspberry Pi daughterboard for the AX5043. This
> allows development with the transceiver independent of the Hercules or IHU.
>
> The drawbacks to the Hercules include terrible documentation and a
> cumbersome parameterized code generation process for development. Jonathan
> believes he is getting a handle on this and there is the possibility of him
> producing improved documentation for this design.
>
> We also discussed the VA10820 - Radiation Hardened ARM® Cortex®-M0 MCU
> https://www.voragotech.com/products/va10820. This is approximately $700,
> but has good stats and a well-documented toolchain. There is at least one
> design that is open source that could be used as a basis for an IHU.
>
> Jonathan to publish the IHU at https://github.com/phase4space/payload-IHU
> Jonathan and Michelle to press for review of the design.
>
> Michelle to publish minutes.
>
> Michelle to arrange for additional IHU conference calls.
>
> Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 and PolarFire devices were brought up outside of
> the meeting.  They are actively advertising radiation hardening for these
> parts and they may be available now and should be discussed.
>
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>


-- 
Bob McGwier
Founder, Federated Wireless, Inc
Founder and Technical Advisor, HawkEye 360, Inc
Research Professor Virginia Tech
Chief Scientist:  The Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and
Technology
Senior Member IEEE, Facebook: N4HYBob, ARS: N4HY
Faculty Advisor Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Assn, Trustee K4KDJ
Member of PVRC (Roanoke-Blacksburg), TAPR,  life member of ARRL and AMSAT,
NRVR.ORG (Rocketry)
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