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Discussion on: Space, The Final Deployment!

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nestedsoftware profile image
Nested Software • Edited

Ah, that makes sense. At reddit a user linked to the following video based on a cubesat deployed by a college in vermont:

blog.adacore.com/carl-brandon-vid

On closer inspection, the hardware they are using is on a totally different scale though. Toward the end of the video, they mention a proton 400k. I looked this up ( cubesatlab.org/IceCube-Hardware.jsp ) and it appears to have a dual core powerpc CPU running at 1GHz.

You guys were operating with something not so far from Apple II hardware, though about 10 times the clock speed thankfully, so probably C/ASM would be the only realistic option! I should have noticed that in your post myself - sorry about that!

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

Yup - I went and found the Reddit post (thank you for the publicity), would have replied but I'm not a Reddit user (and not sure I wish to be!) Their target system for the first satellite (cubesatlab.org/BasicLEO.jsp) was a TI MSP430, which is a 16-bit CPU, with 16k+ RAM. Later work used larger devices.

Also their toolchain was interesting: since there is no native Ada/Spark compiler for MSP430 they transpiled to C... underpinned by ~2k lines of driver code in C.

We have ~10k lines of C (including comments) in the latest build for JY1SAT.