The University of Oslo has developed a novel multi-Needle Langmuir Probe (m-NLP) instrument. This instrument has made it possible to increase the spatial resolution which is needed to map the plasma structures in the ionosphere. The technology consist of exposing an electrode to the plasma to measure the collected current as a function of bias voltage.
The m-NLP instrument continues to be improved and developed to fit various spacecraft platforms such as sounding rockets and satellites. As these platforms may use different solutions to interface and communicate with the instrument payload, there is a need to develop a spacecraft interface simulator. Testing and validation is a very important part of developing a spacecraft payload instrument, and a spacecraft interface simulator will be essential to decrease the development time and improve the quality of the instrument software and hardware.
This master thesis project aims to develop a spacecraft interface simulator that supports the most commonly used interfaces used in our recent projects, e.g. RS422 and SPI. We propose to use a suitable SoC FPGA based development kit that as the main development platform, for example the Xilinx Zynq series. The project will require the interested student to learn about and work with embedded system on chip design for FPGAs. This may include a Linux system running on the processing system part of the FPGA. The main task of the system will be to interface the m-NLP instrument to provide configuration and monitoring of registers and real-time decoding and presentation of received data.