1U CubeSAT Solar Panel
Goal: Design & manufacture a 1U CubeSAT Solar Panel, while being less expensive than commercial alternatives.
My Contribution
Beginning with learning how to use Diptrace, I was able to design the basic circuits for the 1U Solar Panel. Following this, after much research we discovered that we could get nearly 60% of the power from making an array of mono-crystalline cells in parallel for 2.5% the cost of one commercial panel (compared to an EnduroSAT CTJ30 panel). After doing many calculations and a trade study, we decided to go ahead with an array of cells from Digikey. We then successfully built and tested them, performing nearly to max power rating.
Beyond this I designed a standardized PCB for bench-testing PC104 CubeSAT Hardware.
Alongside this, I helped to formalize the website for TigerSATS, and their balloon launch ability (launching a balloon to nearly 100k feet) to prepare for future testing.