Lab Notebook

Video, Slides

Keeping a professional record of your design work is a requirement of the course. If maintained properly, lab notebooks serve as an official and legal record of the development of the intellectual property related to your project. It also serves as a way to document and track changes to your design, results of all tests performed, and the effort you have put into your project. A well-kept notebook will simplify writing of all required documentation for this course (design review, final paper, etc) as all of the information in those documents should already exist in your notebook. Finally, keeping a notebook is simply good engineering practice and likely will be required by future employers, so it is a good idea to get in the habit of maintaining one now.

The Book

Any notebook with permanent bindings designed for laboratory record keeping is acceptable. Notebooks should have pre-numbered pages and square grids on their pages. We will not accept normal spiral-bound notebooks, as these are not permissible in court since pages can be easily replaced. While most of you probably won't be taking your design to court, we want to teach you to get into the habit of keeping legally acceptable records. Some of you may decide you do want to patent your project, so it will be very beneficial to have given yourself the legal advantage from the start.

Electronic Notebook

Alternatively, lab notebooks may be kept digitally as Markdown documents in a Git repo on Github or Gitlab, as in the example below. See a complete example of a 445 Git repo here.

notebooks/
├── alex/
│   ├── README.md
│   └── an_image.png
├── pouya/
│   └── README.md
└── nick/
    ├── README.md
    └── another_image.png
	

Notebook entries:

Each complete entry should include:

  1. Date
  2. Brief statement of objectives for that session
  3. Record of what was done

The record will include equations, diagrams, and figures. These should be numbered for reference in the narrative portion of the book. Written entries and equations should appear on the right-hand page of each pair. Drawn figures, diagrams, and photocopies extracted from published sources should be placed on the left-hand side, which is graph-ruled. All separate documents should be permanently attached to the notebook. All hand-written entries must be made in pen.

Overall, the book should contain a record that is clear and complete, so that someone else can follow progress, understand problems, and understand decisions that were made in designing and executing the project.

What to include:

There is always something to record:

Suppose you are only "kicking around" design ideas for the project with someone, or scanning library sources. Your objective is what you're hoping to find. The record shows what you found or what you decided and why, even if it isn't final.

One of the most common errors is to fail to record these seemingly "unimportant" activities. Down the road, they may prove crucial in understanding when and where a particular idea came from.

Submission and Deadlines

Lab notebooks must be submitted at lab checkout on Reading Day. If you are unable to attend lab checkout, please make arrangements with your TA ahead of time.

ATTITUDE DETERMINATION AND CONTROL MODULE FOR UIUC NANOSATELLITES

Shamith Achanta, Rick Eason, Srikar Nalamalapu

Featured Project

Team Members:

- Rick Eason (reason2)

- Srikar Nalamalapu (svn3)

- Shamith Achanta (shamith2)

# Problem

The Aerospace Engineering department's Laboratory for Advanced Space Systems at Illinois (LASSI) develops nanosatellites for the University of Illinois. Their next-generation satellite architecture is currently in development, however the core bus does not contain an Attitude Determination and Control (ADCS) system.

In order for an ADCS system to be useful to LASSI, the system must be compliant with their modular spacecraft bus architecture.

# Solution

Design, build, and test an IlliniSat-0 spec compliant ADCS module. This requires being able to:

- Sense and process the Earth's weak magnetic field as it passes through the module.

- Sense and process the spacecraft body's <30 dps rotation rate.

- Execute control algorithms to command magnetorquer coil current drivers.

- Drive current through magnetorquer coils.

As well as being compliant to LASSI specification for:

- Mechanical design.

- Electrical power interfaces.

- Serial data interfaces.

- Material properties.

- Serial communications protocol.

# Solution Components

## Sensing

Using the Rohm BM1422AGMV 3-axis magnetometer we can accurately sense 0.042 microTesla per LSB, which gives very good overhead for sensing Earth's field. Furthermore, this sensor is designed for use in wearable electronics as a compass, so it also contains programable low-pass filters. This will reduce MCU processing load.

Using the Bosch BMI270 3-axis gyroscope we can accurately sense rotation rate at between ~16 and ~260 LSB per dps, which gives very good overhead to sense low-rate rotation of the spacecraft body. This sensor also contains a programable low-pass filter, which will help reduce MCU processing load.

Both sensors will communicate over I2C to the MCU.

## Serial Communications

The LASSI spec for this module requires the inclusion of the following serial communications processes:

- CAN-FD

- RS422

- Differential I2C

The CAN-FD interface is provided from the STM-32 MCU through a SN65HVD234-Q1 transceiver. It supports all CAN speeds and is used on all other devices on the CAN bus, providing increased reliability.

The RS422 interface is provided through GPIO from the STM-32 MCU and uses the TI THVD1451 transceiver. RS422 is a twisted-pair differential serial interface that provides high noise rejection and high data rates.

The Differential I2C is provided by a specialized transceiver from NXP, which allows I2C to be used reliably in high-noise and board-to-board situations. The device is the PCA9615.

I2C between the sensors and the MCU is provided by the GPIO on the MCU and does not require a transceiver.

## MCU

The MCU will be an STM32L552, exact variant and package is TBD due to parts availability. This MCU provides significant processing power, good GPIO, and excellent build and development tools. Firmware will be written in either C or Rust, depending on some initial testing.

We have access to debugging and flashing tools that are compatible with this MCU.

## Magnetics Coils and Constant Current Drivers

We are going to wind our own copper wire around coil mandrels to produce magnetorquers that are useful geometries for the device. A 3d printed mandrel will be designed and produced for each of the three coils. We do not believe this to be a significant risk of project failure because the geometries involved are extremely simple and the coil does not need to be extremely precise. Mounting of the coils to the board will be handled by 3d printed clips that we will design. The coils will be soldered into the board through plated through-holes.

Driving the inductors will be the MAX8560 500mA buck converter. This converter allows the MCU to toggle the activity of the individual coils separately through GPIO pins, as well as good soft-start characteristics for the large current draw of the coils.

## Board Design

This project requires significant work in the board layout phase. A 4-layer PCB is anticipated and due to LASSI compliance requirements the board outline, mounting hole placement, part keep-out zones, and a large stack-through connector (Samtec ERM/F-8) are already defined.

Unless constrained by part availability or required for other reasons, all parts will be SMD and will be selected for minimum footprint area.

# Criterion For Success

Success for our project will be broken into several parts:

- Electronics

- Firmware

- Compatibility

Compatibility success is the easiest to test. The device must be compatible with LASSI specifications for IlliniSat-0 modules. This is verifiable through mechanical measurement, board design review, and integration with other test articles.

Firmware success will be determined by meeting the following criteria:

- The capability to initialize, configure, and read accurate data from the IMU sensors. This is a test of I2C interfacing and will be tested using external test equipment in the LASSI lab. (We have approval to use and access to this equipment)

- The capability to control the output states of the magnetorquer coils. This is a test of GPIO interfacing in firmware.

- The capability to move through different control modes, including: IDLE, FAULT, DETUMBLE, SLEW, and TEST. This will be validated through debugger interfacing, as there is no visual indication system on this device to reduce power waste.

- The capability to self-test and to identify faults. This will be validated through debugger interfacing, as there is no visual indication system on this device to reduce power waste.

- The capability to communicate to other modules on the bus over CAN or RS422 using LASSI-compatible serial protocols. This will be validated through the use of external test equipment designed for IlliniSat-0 module testing.

**Note:** the development of the actual detumble and pointing algorithms that will be used in orbital flight fall outside the reasonable scope of electrical engineering as a field. We are explicitly designing this system such that an aerospace engineering team can develop control algorithms and drop them into our firmware stack for use.

Electronics success will be determined through the successful operation of the other criteria, if the board layout is faulty or a part was poorly selected, the system will not work as intended and will fail other tests. Electronics success will also be validated by measuring the current consumption of the device when operating. The device is required not to exceed 2 amps of total current draw from its dedicated power rail at 3.3 volts. This can be verified by observing the benchtop power supply used to run the device in the lab.