Low cost yaw controller for CubeSat oriented to education and entertainment

Abstract

This project aims to develop a yaw controller system for a CubeSat prototype, which tracks a remote set point signal. This prototype is oriented to education and entertainment in aerospace technologies. Aiming to reducing the costs, commercial off-the-shelf devices (COTS) were used. Thus, a Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller was utilized for computational work, a couple of 2.4GHz transceiver for communication between CubeSat and base station (where is the set point command), accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, H bridge circuit for driving a DC motor. The firmware was divided in two parts: The setup and the principal loop. After tests was noticed that the controller performance is restricted to nonlinearities that appear due to reaction wheel nature (saturation). This device can be very helpful in education and entertainment to understand the yaw dynamic of spacecrafts (such as satellites), the principles of feedback control, as well as embedded systems applications.