CubeSAT Kit for Children

Programmer and Electronic Designer

January 2016 – December 2017

Built with: LabVIEW, ARMmbed, C, Kicad, i2c and UART protocols, sensors (gyro, barometer, color, UV radiation, humidity)

Prize:

Regional Winner at Expociencias Puebla 2016

About the Project:

This project involved the design of a CubeSAT Kit made for didactic purposes, we intended to create a modular Satellite that children could manipulate, where each level involved important elements that a satellite should have, we also created a User Interface with LabVIEW to complement the physical structure.

The project was born from our interest to teach freshmen students about the current project that we were part of, the University’s CubeSAT. So that they were able to identify easily the main components that this CubeSAT should have, and therefore their learning curve was faster and they were able to help us with the project in less time. After several weeks, we decided that we could use this project to promote STEM with children in general. So we added to the team a Pedagogy student, so that she could help us to create didactic material to complement what we had.

I was responsible for the PCB design of the different levels and the programming of the ARMmbed, which was the board that controlled the entire satellite.

CubeSAT Description:

As mentioned before, we designed this CubeSAT as a modular satellite, involving different levels:

– Red: Level of Power Supply and Antena

– Blue: Level of Main Board (ARMmbed)

– Green: Level of Payload, includes different sensors, a display and a camera.

Electrical Design:

I was responsible of the PCB design of the multiple levels, I used the software KiCad to complete this task seen that we needed the Gerber file to make the PCBs with a CNC machine. I tried to maintain all boards as simple as possible to avoid using double sided PCBs.

The main challenge of the entire Kit was to find the perfect components to make the vertical conections, we used headers but they broke easily. We tried with multiple components and at the end we decided to use cables, the next movement was to use flexible connections but we stopped the project.

GALLERY