Cube Satellite

Our CubeSat main objective is taking photos with the help of five subsystems OBC, PAYLOAD, COMMUNICATION, EPS, and ADCS.

Each subsystem contributes an important role to get an efficient performance of the whole CubeSat, The Ground Station is responsible for monitoring the status of CubeSat, sending commands, and receiving telemetry.

Ground Station is simulated using LabVIEW used for user interface and Wi-Fi module used to send and receive data.

EPS subsystem monitors voltage and current levels of all batteries, once it senses low voltage and current it alarms OBC with “Low Battery State”.

OBC is the brain subsystem of the whole cube it's responsible for the following:

1. Transmission of a time reference in the entire system.

CubeSat has built-in RTC (Real Time Clock), As CubeSat is a real-time system and all commands coming from the Ground Station and sensors' readings sent to the Ground Station must have a time stamp.

2. Activation/Deactivation of other subsystems depending on certain conditions.

3. Management and configuration of payloads.

4. Decoding remote controls.

All commands coming from the ground station are encrypted and OBC has to translate them to take an action.

5. Encoding of Telemetry.

Telemetry is all data coming from CubeSat to the Ground Station like sensor reading or images, And also it has to be encoded during transmission, once reaches the ground station it will be decrypted.

6. Collect satellite telemetry and store them inside SD card memory.

7. Monitor subsystems' power levels.

8. Communicate with other subsystems.

ADCS is the main subsystem responsible for controlling the movement of the camera using arm controlled by two servos one for left and right movement and another one for up and down movement.

PAYLOAD is a subsystem used to initialize the camera, set its shooting mode, image size, image type, and extract the image also store it on an SD card with its right timestamp.