ThinSat

DC Space Grant Consortium

Lily was under grant from the NASA DC Space Grant Consortium to develop a generic particle detector Arduino library for the ThinSat program. ThinSats are small satellites capable of transmitting data from low earth orbit. They are about the size of a piece of bread and are stacked into cubed ‘loaves’ (which are the size of a traditional CubeSat). ThinSat teams include middle school to college students and are managed by a lead institute such as a university or NASA site (Lily worked with American University’s ThinSat team). The goal of the ThinSat program is to promote STEM education by giving students a platform to develop satellite hardware, test sensor components with low and high altitude balloon flights, analyze data, and launch an actual payload into space.

ThinSats usually include a microcontroller (master) connected to a sensor component (minion). Most prebuilt sensor components come with a manufacturer-made software library ready for use with C++/Arduino, but if students want to build a sensor component or use a sensor component without a pre-made library, they must write their own. Writing a C++ software library can be daunting for middle and high school students or non-Computer-Science majors, so the goal of the particle detector library is to provide students with a generic minion library and corresponding base firmware (master) so they can have more freedom to build their own sensor components or use less documented sensor components.

The particle detector library is open-source and on Github. Lily worked on the base firmware code and the particle detector (minion) functions in Summer 2019 and the beginning of the Fall 2019 semester, then, the second half of the semester was spent configuring the I2C functionality between master and minion within the framework of the library. 

DC Space Grant Consortium members at the 30th Anniversary Space Grant celebration at Capitol Hill (2020)