Sound Byte
This project is a proof of concept diagnostic & testing board for use with the power board in the Cubesat Satellite and will be developed further to become a component of the CUSat Satellite.

Summary of What We Did and Why
This project’s goal is to create diagnostics and testing hardware for use by the power subsystem of the soon-to-be launched Cornell ICE Cube Satellite and the new CUSat project (Part of the Nanosat4 Project).

This hardware is a proof of concept PCB, designed to test and diagnose the CubeSat power board independently, but will be developed further to interface within the CUSat Satellite. Ultimately, this board will be used for hardware verification of software command execution & to detect hardware faults of all main boards of the satellite.

The project can be divided into two main disciplines: the design and creation of the PCB and the MCU code that interfaces with the board’s peripheral hardware. Functionally, the diagnostics and testing board can turn the power board on and off by simulating the pull before flight pin & kill switches, toggle different subsystems to turn on, simulate the variable loads of the subsystems, report the current and voltages of each subsystem and provide for bidirectional current readings generated by the torque coil circuitry on the power board. The board can select any of the regulator outputs, including the H-bridge coils and load them with one of four power resistors as specified by the existing cubesat manual testing document.

The software running on the Mega128 allows the operator to either run a default script to test everything on the board or to run specific singular tasks for verification of functionality. The interface to the board is either though a menu system via the RS232 port or allowing the board to time out to the default script and rely solely on the LCD numeric codes and associated error LEDs.