Open-Source CubeSat Flight Board

The Helmsman Flight Board is an open-source main flight computer and electrical power system for educational and entry-level CubeSats. The board incorporates commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in conjunction with simplified monitoring and management circuitry, supporting easy adoption, modifiability, and affordability while crucially enabling the emerging aerospace industry’s rapid ‘design-build-test’ methodology in student satellite teams. Its design includes essential CubeSat subsystems such as battery management, command and data handling, attitude determination, on-board processing, and is built to support real-time embedded operating systems. Key features include an Arm Cortex-M7 based STM32, radiation-resistant memory for OS storage, bulk Flash memory, real-time clock, two gyroscopes, two accelerometers, magnetometer, payload and peripheral board connectors, and hardware monitoring circuitry. The board is designed to adhere to the CubeSat Design Specification and typical satellite deployment systems’ requirements. The Helmsman board reduces both cost and complexity by employing a single-board approach and eliminating larger, modular avionics stacks that typically occupy valuable CubeSat volume. Both the board schematics and layout were designed to be easily modified to enable customization with varying mission requirements with minimal specialized expertise. A separate Programmer Board is used as a breakout test bench platform for the Helmsman Flight Board and acts as a battery charger. Both Helmsman and compatible form-factor boards can be mounted to this board and receive clean power for rapid bringup and pre-flight assembly checkouts. The first version of both boards was manufactured and preliminarily tested which provided valuable performance metrics and caught schematic layout elements which should be improved in future work. Helmsman will also need to undergo additional experimentation such as in-depth software benchmarks, environmental tests, and communication tests before utilizing this board for space.