Several years ago when our president J was getting his PhD in rocket propulsion, he suggested the university look into using cheap, relatively easy to use programmable micro controllers like the Arduino for controlling small satellites like CubeSats. At the time, other micro controllers like the Beagle Bone Black (BBB) weren’t available.

Yesterday, J came across a Google Summer of Code project called BeagleSat, which is the same sort of idea that J had, to have an open source framework for building CubeSats.

Furthermore, if we were to do something like this today, we’d lean towards the BBB because of its power and versatility.

We’re very curious to see how far they can take this project. They published weekly status updates on their project web page, and it looks like there’s some cool work done, but also a lot more to do. We’re always happy to see documentation being reported on a regular basis, and it looks to us like this will be a great open source hardware project.