Posted by Mikhael Semaan (Project Manager).

Original notes taken by Eric Hanna (Design and Manufacturing).

Table of Contents

These are our notes from meeting with Mr. Hill, the instructor of EE 400D, following our CDR Presentation [1].

General Notes

Overall, the presentation was very polished.
Need to completely black out the camera to detect single-event upsets (SEUs).
Taking off the lens is an idea, but not realistic within the time-frame (something for next semester, perhaps?).
At this point we need it to work, so we can cover with electrical tape.
Show basic functionality.
Future semesters need to do further testing, especially on radiation detection and SEU/camera stuff.
We’re not detecting a flipped bit, we’re detecting a filled potential well (with the camera).
Nailed the Executive Summary.
Need a little more detail in System Design for the final blog post.
No UART or COMM on PC/104. Put this in “lessons learned” for future groups.
DB9 still a good idea, because it allows us not to “use up” the lifetime of the PC/104 connector with too much connecting and reconnecting. Pigtail connector in the future?

Lessons Learned

There were lots of trade-off studies,
not so much “experiments.”
Requirements must link to higher-level requirements for trade-offs and experiments.

Didn’t show cable routing.
- Even though we don’t have any cables to route, we should have acknowledged that explicitly.

Fritzing diagram could have been nicer (i.e. curved wires).
Mention that the PC/104 bus is standardized and is a standard often used in CubeSats.

Could’ve seen distinction between “verified” versus “validated.”
We treated the DC-HVDC converter as an IC, but it’s not. It’s a module, and we don’t technically know what’s in the module. Lesson learned: in the future, stay away from modules unless we know what’s inside.