The Avionics Desk
What we're learning while building a flight software platform that fits in 68 KB of flash and the good judgment of a few engineers.
Featured
Load tables by mode, eclipse fraction, solar-array sizing with EOL degradation, battery depth-of-discharge — and a worked 6U example you can reproduce.
ICARUS Engineering 
How a Two-Line Element set and the SGP4 propagator become ground-station pass windows — AOS, LOS, elevation masks, max elevation — and why TLE freshness is the whole accuracy story.
ICARUS Engineering 
Orbital decay physics, ballistic coefficient, solar-cycle sensitivity, the FCC 5-year post-mission disposal rule, ESA Zero Debris, and remediation options.
ICARUS Engineering 
The plane-change delta-v formula, delta-v = 2 v sin(delta-i/2), derived — with two-burn Hohmann delta-v from vis-viva, combined maneuvers, and propellant mass via Tsiolkovsky. Worked 400 to 700 km example.
ICARUS Engineering 
The full downlink chain — EIRP, back-off loss, FSPL, ITU-R P.618 rain fade, G/T, C/N0, Eb/N0 — with a worked 8.2 GHz X-band CubeSat example.
ICARUS Engineering 
ICARUS — our satellite OBC platform — runs the full stack (kernel + OBC app + ground-link protocols) in 68 KB of flash on a Cortex-M7. No Linux. No FreeRTOS. Here's why, and what it cost us to get here.
ICARUS Engineering