Purpose: Developing a well-rounded platform for future club projects.
2019-2020 was OTRAs first year participating in a CubeSat project. With little experience working on CubeSats and under a year to develop designing new hardware was determined not possible. Instead, the objective was to launch any functioning hardware on a CubeSat utilizing predeveloped materials capable, but not optimized for the task into space.
The prototype board project is a subset of OTRAs CubeSat Space Debris project without the constraints. The goal is to bring OTRA a full prototype board students will be able to customize, curate, and deploy in future CubeSat projects. It will be developed to optimize power and performance using modern computer hardware.
The prototype board utilizes a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) as the image processor and a microprocessor for general purpose processing. Combined, a high-speed camera can operate at its full potential. The board can operate with various battery voltages, turn on/off individual camera cards, and save images to long term storage with redundancy to reduce errors. The design is constructed with two 10x10cm boards stacked vertically with some modularity to facilitate expansion.