CubeSat Electrical Power System - Architecture and Board Design
The University of Toronto Aerospace Team (UTAT) is developing a 3U CubeSat to conduct crop residue mapping from Low-Earth Orbit. As Electrical Power System Lead, I architected the satellite’s power subsystem by defining requirements, coming up with the high-level design, maintaining a detailed power budget informed by STK simulations, and selecting and procuring critical components such as photovoltaic cells, lithium-ion batteries, and the ICs and inductors for our board. I led my team implementing the architecture as a form-factor compliant PCB, mentoring them through schematic and layout design and board bring-up, while also completing detailed design work myself, including for the power multiplexer and MPPT controller.
Since this is a whole subsystem, it’s much larger in scale than my previous projects and it pushed me to develop stronger debugging and validation strategies. I designed the PCBs with modular testing in mind. For example, I added switches to isolate functional blocks and connectors to optionally plug in a daughter board with a new revision of a bad functional block. I also designed and assembled test-specific solar panels output electrical characteristics that matched our flight hardware, allowing us to preserve the real panels during bring-up.
