Embedded Firmware Development for a Novel CubeSat Gamma-Ray Detector
Joseph Mangan, David Murphy, Rachel Dunwoody, Maeve Doyle, Alexey, Ulyanov, Lorraine Hanlon, Brian Shortt, Sheila McBreen, Masoud Emam, Jessica, Erkal, Joe Flanagan, Gianluca Fontanesi, Andrew Gloster, Conor O'Toole,, Favour Okosun, Rakhi RajagopalanNair, Jack Reilly

TL;DR
This paper presents the development and testing of custom firmware for a gamma-ray detector on a CubeSat, demonstrating reliable data transfer and low power consumption in a space environment.
Contribution
It introduces a novel firmware implementation for the GMOD experiment on a CubeSat, optimized for low power and high data integrity in space conditions.
Findings
Firmware supports input trigger frequencies up to 1kHz
Packet loss remains below 1% at 1kHz
Power consumption stays under 31mW
Abstract
The Gamma-ray Module (GMOD) is an experiment designed for the detection of gamma-ray bursts in low Earth orbit as the principal scientific payload on a 2-U CubeSat, EIRSAT-1. GMOD comprises a cerium bromide scintillator coupled to silicon photomultipliers which are processed and digitised by a bespoke ASIC. Custom firmware on the GMOD motherboard has been designed, implemented and tested for the MSP430 microprocessor which manages the experiment including readout, storage and configuration of the system. The firmware has been verified in a series of experiments testing the response over a realistic range of input detector trigger frequencies from 50Hz to 1kHz for the primary time tagged event (TTE) data. The power consumption and ability of the firmware to successfully receive and transmit the packets to the on-board computer was investigated. The experiment demonstrated less than 1%…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
