Space · embedded engineering
A whole satellite — power, sensors, processor and radio — inside the volume of a drinks can. One flight to get it right.
CanSat is a European Space Agency educational competition. The challenge is to fit all the major subsystems of a real satellite — power, sensors, a processor and a radio link — inside a standard drinks can. It is carried aloft, released, and descends under a parachute while transmitting data to a ground station.
A CanSat gets exactly one descent to prove itself. The electronics have to survive launch and release, the firmware has to stay alive through vibration and temperature swings, and the radio link has to keep delivering data the whole way down.
We designed the electronics and wrote the firmware around a microcontroller, sensors and a wireless link. The primary mission logs temperature and pressure through the descent; the system streams that telemetry live and stores it on board as a backup in case the link drops for a moment.
One flight forces the habits we use in production software: test everything you can on the ground, design for the failure modes you can't avoid, and keep the system simple enough to trust when it counts.
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