Author: Bill Tandy
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What radio frequencies are used in space?
A photon doesn’t know it, but humans have decided to call it a bunch of different things. One of the ways we label it is by saying that a photon’s energy level happens to fall within a “Band”.
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What is a Satellite Transponder?
This should be simple but different satellites use transponders for different reasons.
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Electronic Data Sheets
Electronic Data Sheets are a way to create and document your software interfaces. You can use them for any software project to make it much easier to maintain. And NASA’s cFS team sees the potential, too, so they and the community have started to create the capability in an add-on package. They may also make…
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Starting a Flight Software Project
Take any veteran software developer to lunch and they’ll tell you story after story of the things they wish they’d known when they started. And they can fill a second lunch of conversation with things they see new developers on their team doing that are only going to lead to pain later.
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cFS App: Telemetry Output Lab
Getting data out of your system when it’s in the lab can be surprisingly complex sometimes. NASA has solved a big part of the problem for you by providing the Telemetry Output “Lab” app.
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cFS App: Command Ingest Lab
When your system is out flying or swimming around, you’ll probably use some sort of radio to talk with it. But when your system is on the ground, you’ll probably want to plug in a cable to talk with it. (Cables usually let you talk faster and get more data back and forth than a…
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cFS App: Scheduler Lab
Would you like something to happen every day precisely at 2:03 in the morning? Would you like a series of things to happen, one right after the other? Or perhaps you want something to happen every second?
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cFS App Layer
If you spend weeks and months creating a robust guidance, navigation, and control algorithm for reaction wheels, wouldn’t you like to use that on a new spacecraft by just copying the folder over and installing it?
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cFE Table Service
Tables are great at organizing information in easy-to-understand ways. If your temperature function needs to know what the maximum temperature limit is, it can look it up in a table. If your control algorithm needs to know what steps it should take every time the computer restarts, it can look it up in its table…