Our new ground station hardware concept

New ground station hardware concept

For the European CanSat competition, we have decided on a new hardware concept. According to this new concept, the antennae will be connected to an external hardware component instead of connecting them directly to the computer. Furthermore this hardware ‘box’ should show the current packet loss of the inbound traffic from the satellite as well as an indication of outgoing traffic to the satellite. This will allow the operator of the antennae to quickly adjust the direction of the antennae to improve the quality of the transmission as fast as possible.

In addition, the task distribution process during the launch benefits from this feature because the person operating the computer can now concentrate more on the real time monitoring of the data instead of having to tell the person operating the antennae the level of the current packet loss.

A first sketch of the new ground station hardware

As the first step in implementing this new concept, we are currently trying to control the little OLED display. We have already managed to get it to display a simple ‘Hello World’ program as well as our team logo. The only thing left to do is to integrate the display in our current pc software setup.

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