1 research outputs found
Design of telemetry update for reaction wheel unit
Bradford Engineering is currently one of the top suppliers of reaction wheels in Europe. To be able to hold that position they need to improve the reaction wheels to meet more stringent requirements for future missions when it comes to stability of the wheel’s speed and communication capabilities.A part of the updates needed in the reaction wheel to meet these challenges is a re-definition of the Field Programmable Gate Array [FPGA] capabilities in their current Wheel Drive Electronics [WDE] module. My contribution in this one year project consisted of work on documentation for current running missions and to establish the baseline for the update needed in the code running in the FPGA.The work with documentation consisted of an update on documents that needed to be provided to the costumer, Astrium: Radiation Analysis, Reliability Prediction, Failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis [FMECA] and test procedures for the Reaction Wheel Unit [RWU] that is being used for qualifying purposes. This work had an additional value of providing me the necessary background about the product so that I could later work on the update of the FPGA.It was my task in the FPGA re design to evaluate the necessary changes that would be needed in the hardware so that an additional communication protocol is added, leaving enough capacity in the selected hardware to include an autonomous controller for wheel speed in the future. After this tradeoff on the hardware that needed to match the new requirements, I selected a new protocol interface so that it can be offered to the clients. This was later implemented in Very High SpeedIntegrated Circuit [VHDL].I did an additional study on the requirements for code development and I provided, together with this study, documentation explaining the steps needed to develop the code according to these requirements, so that once the full set of requirements is defined, the company could continue with the development, using the existing work.The overall result of a year of work at Bradford is a set of documents that I updated to meet the requirements of the costumer and a design on the new telemetry that can be used as the baseline for future versions of the RWU. The full design cycle is covered in the telemetry update, from definition of requirements to the verification using evaluation software. The whole process of VHDL design can be traced through the documents of the telemetry update that were provided