Implementation of the communication between SiC, Piezo-LEGS and On-board Computer

Abstract: This thesis presents the work of adding support for a communications protocol in a space application. The work is a part of KTHs MIST (MIniature STudent Satellite) project which aims at sending an experimental satellite into space. Each experiment on the satellite is designed as a subsystem. These subsystems need to be able to communicate with the main computer on the satellite in order to transfer the results of the experiments down to earth. In efforts prior to the current thesis, a special communications protocol has been specified to solve this problem. That protocol is called MSP (MIST Space Protocol). This paper describes the efforts to add support for MSP to two of the satellite’s experiments. These two experiments are called SiC in Space and Piezo-LEGS. However, since Piezo-LEGS is incompatible with the I2C bus in which MSP runs on top of, it must communicate through the SiC experiment. Which parts of the protocol that need to be supported by each experiment are defined. The result of the work is that the experiments can communicate with the main computer through the MSP protocol.