TOP.04 // OBC-CDH
On-Board Computing, CDH & Fault-Tolerant Flight Software
ARM Cortex-M, MSP430 FRAM, and RISC-V flight processors, watchdog hierarchies, brownout state machines, and SEU/SEL radiation mitigation for COTS avionics.
1. SatWiki Encyclopedia Specifications (6)
- SQ-SS-002
On-board computer and data handling (OBC/CDH)
Runs the flight software, executes telecommands, builds telemetry, stores data and manages the operating modes. Small satellites use commercial microcontrollers protected against radiation effects by software and hardware measures.
- SQ-SS-008
Payloads
What small satellites carry: radios and spectrum monitors, cameras, laser-ranging reflectors, sensors, propulsion and materials experiments. In a PocketQube the payload competes for a few square boards, a fraction of half a watt and a downlink of kilobytes per pass.
- SQ-SS-011
Flight software & fault recovery
State machines, real-time operating systems, brown-out bootloops, external watchdog hierarchies and non-volatile parameter storage on small satellites.
- SQ-SS-012
Telemetry framing & protocols
AX.25, CubeSat Space Protocol (CSP), CCSDS reed-solomon/convolutional coding, Morse CW beacons and Kaitai Struct decoders for small-satellite downlinks.
- SQ-EN-005
Radiation effects & COTS screening
Total ionizing dose (TID), single-event upsets (SEU) and destructive latch-up (SEL) in the South Atlantic Anomaly for 500–600 km COTS avionics.
- SQ-EN-006
Reliability & failure statistics
Empirical survival rates, dead-on-arrival root causes (EPS, antenna release, unknown TLE) and lessons from the 2013–2025 PocketQube census.
2. Interactive Lab Calculators & Workbenches (2)
3. Technical Notes (2)
- NL-TN-2026-020
CubeSat corner rail tribology, PC/104 stack mechanics and PQ9/CS14 backplanes
We examine the mechanical and electrical backbone of a CubeSat: the four 8.5 mm corner rails that interface with the deployer, the tribology of MIL-A-8625 Type III hard anodizing against vacuum cold welding, and the dynamic stiffness of a four-rod M3 PC/104 PCB stack compared against PocketQube 42×42 mm M2 stacks and the PQ9/CS14 backplane standard.
- NL-TN-2026-009
How much data can a PocketQube download per day?
We compute the daily contact time of a single ground station for a 525 km Sun-synchronous orbit across station latitudes and elevation masks, apply framing efficiency for AX.25 and CSP, and tabulate the net payload volume delivered per day at 1200 to 9600 bit/s.