PAST CubeSat Telemetry Validation

This project validates the telemetry communication link for a CubeSat system. It consists of two parts: firmware running on an STM32L4 microcontroller that encodes and transmits telemetry packets over UART, and a Python receiver on the host that parses the incoming stream, checks packet integrity, and logs the results.

The goal is to confirm the receiver handles both normal traffic and fault conditions correctly before the firmware is finalised for flight.

How it works

The transmitter encodes telemetry into framed packets and sends them serially. Each packet carries a type, sequence number, payload, and an integrity check. Either a CRC for simple packets or Reed-Solomon FEC for larger, fragmented payloads. The receiver syncs to the stream, parses each packet, verifies the checksum or reconstructs the RS shards, and logs everything to telemetry_receiver.log.

Building the firmware

You'll need the arm-none-eabi-gcc toolchain, CMake, and OpenOCD.

cmake -B build/Debug
cmake --build build/Debug --clean-first

To flash via ST-LINK:

openocd -f interface/stlink.cfg -f target/stm32l4x.cfg
arm-none-eabi-gdb build/Debug/telemetry_transmitter.elf

Or using STM32CubeProgrammer directly:

STM32_Programmer_CLI -c port=ST-LINK -w build/Debug/telemetry_transmitter.elf -v -rst

Running the receiver

cd receiver
python receiver.py

Events are written to telemetry_receiver.log in the project root.