apex: A new commercial off-the-shelf on-board computer platform for sounding rockets

Abstract

In order to supersede the aging Microchip ATMEGA328P as the de facto standard for Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) On-Board Computers (OBCs) with a more powerful system for different kinds of high-speed sensors and image acquisition applications, we developed advanced processors, encryption, and security experiment (apex). The platform consisting of a newly developed OBC using COTS components has been flight tested during the ATEK/MAPHEUS-8 sounding rocket campaign. The main advantages of the apex OBC lies in the speed and simplicity of the design while maintaining operational security with a redundant master-master microcontroller system, as well as dual flash storage within each master. Additionally, a single board computer with a containerized and failure-resistant Operating System (OS) (balenaOS) was included to allow usage of a high-definition camera or other more compute-intensive tasks. The bench and flight tests were performed successfully and already showed feasible ways to further improve operational performance.