A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
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A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#2To some extend, space electronics have a lot in common with stuff used to manage industrial plants.
For examples in Chinese megascale steel mills, while SCADA's are used for monitoring and higher level control, operational aspects are handled by handcrafted PLCs made of modern analogues of 7400 series, 8t sram, redundant sensors, quoruming and BCH coding, mram, mems oscilators, and all solid DC-DC conversion, and all of that is provided with manual overrides
Most important feature of all of this is that it provides hard, near physical, impediment to wrong inputs from higher level control systems (SCADAs.)
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#3This is a decently embedded ad for Snap EDA and a pretty good ad for Astralis.
Not hugely informative, but nice. The title over-promises pretty wildly.
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#4This is a decently embedded ad for Snap EDA and a pretty good ad for Astralis. Not hugely informative, but nice. The title over-promises pretty wildly.
Not hugely informative, but nice. The title over-promises pretty wildly.
That's practically an understatement. It just barely touches on the challenges of extreme temperature range and radiation hardening. The difficulty of getting your design to pass worst case analysis can be rather dispiriting when you have to drastically derate it to account for -55 to 125 degrees C temp range. Further insult comes from derating to account for total dose radiation effects (depending on orbit), although the article seems to only mention the need to account for single event upset events. Handling SEU's is actually a pretty interesting design challenge. Total dose, on the other hand, is just a bummer.
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#5I read so many stories about companies with new ideas for satellite internet. But i am visiting my parents next weekend. Their house is off grid in rural BC. They only have one internet option: a dish pointed to a geostationary sat which I will no doubt have to repoint on saturday. They pay insane rates for practically no bandwidth. There is only the one company: explorenet. When exactly are any of these innovations going to hit the canadian market?
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#6I always had the impression 99% of all space-electronic problems come from the fact that you have to lift stuff from earth.
You get plenty of sunlight to power your stuff and since gravity isn't as bad as on earth you can build stuff big enough to be shielded from almost everything.
But well, it has to go up somehow :D
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#7This is a decently embedded ad for Snap EDA and a pretty good ad for Astralis. Not hugely informative, but nice. The title over-promises pretty wildly.
Not hugely informative, but nice. The title over-promises pretty wildly. That's practically an understatement. It just barely touches on the challenges of extreme temperature range and radiation hardening. The difficulty of getting your design to pass worst case analysis can be rather dispiriting when you have to drastically derate it to account for -55 to 125 degrees C temp range. Further insult comes from derating…
Where are you getting that temp range? The last payload electronics I designed (an RF PA) only had to handle -20 to 70 C, and the actual temp swing is less. Of course this is inside a bus.
Military electronics are just as bad, as they have to operate from the Antarctic to the desert, and be thrown from the back of a helicopter onto concrete.
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#8I read so many stories about companies with new ideas for satellite internet. But i am visiting my parents next weekend. Their house is off grid in rural BC. They only have one internet option: a dish pointed to a geostationary sat which I will no doubt have to repoint on saturday. They pay insane rates for practically no bandwidth. There is only the one company: explorenet. When exactly are any of these innovations…
Checkout starlink the satellite network being created by spacex. Here is a good FAQ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7zqm2c/starlink_f...
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#9I read so many stories about companies with new ideas for satellite internet. But i am visiting my parents next weekend. Their house is off grid in rural BC. They only have one internet option: a dish pointed to a geostationary sat which I will no doubt have to repoint on saturday. They pay insane rates for practically no bandwidth. There is only the one company: explorenet. When exactly are any of these innovations…
When exactly are any of these innovations going to hit the canadian market?
When are they going to hit any market? There are plenty of companies promising the world, but it is a difficult, expensive, and time consuming problem. I believe better options will come, but I don't see any on the near term horizon.
Re: A satellite engineer explains the basics of space electronics
#10I've been designing semiconductors for 20 years and I thought I would learn something but this article said nothing other than he wished there were more radiation hardened devices out there.
You can learn more from wikipedia than this article.