Rocket tracking system
The tracking hardware lives on a Zynq, so the ground station is half FPGA and half Linux. We got PetaLinux building from a container, moved off the vendor BSP onto our own, and wired up the AXI paths between the fabric and the processing system. Timing comes from gpsd and NTP on the local network.
The challenge
The client had a working board but no repeatable way to build the software for it. Images came out of whatever machine happened to build them, so every change carried the risk of an image nobody could rebuild later. On top of that the FPGA side and the Linux side had to agree on how they talk, and none of that was written down. Getting the platform reproducible mattered as much as getting it running.
Spaceific
2023 to 2024
Bob + Erwin
Embedded Linux platform and FPGA interfacing
How we built it
Reproducible platform build
PetaLinux building from a container, so the same image comes out on any machine. We moved off the vendor BSP onto our own once the peripherals we needed were pinned down.
AXI plumbing
Wired up the paths between the programmable logic and the processing system, covering AXI-Lite, full and master, and documented what each one is actually for.
Timing and positioning
gpsd for position and NTP over the local network for time, with a real-time kernel patch to keep the scheduling honest.