In order to supersede the aging Microchip ATMEGA328P as the de facto standard for Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) On-Board Computers (OBCs) with a more powerful system for different kinds of high-speed sensors and image acquisition applications, we developed advanced processors, encryption, and security experiment (apex). The platform consisting of a newly developed OBC using COTS components has been flight tested during the ATEK\/MAPHEUS-8 sounding rocket campaign. The main advantages of the apex OBC lies in the speed and simplicity of the design while maintaining operational security with a redundant master-master microcontroller system, as well as dual flash storage within each master. Additionally, a single board computer with a containerized and failure-resistant Operating System (OS) (balenaOS) was included to allow usage of a high-definition camera or other more compute-intensive tasks. The bench and flight tests were performed successfully and already showed feasible ways to further improve operational performance. <\/p>\n\n\n
Published by \"American Institute of Physics\" (AIP) in \"Review of Scientific Instruments\" ( ISSN: 0034-6748 \/ DOI: 10.1063\/1.5118855<\/a> )<\/p>\n\n\n Download (Paper): DLR Elib<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n Watch Video of flight on Youtube<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n Release on balena.io Blog<\/a> (09.10.2019)<\/p>\n\n\n Release on Hackaday<\/a> (11.10.2019)<\/p>\n\n\n Release on thenewstack.io<\/a> (03.11.2019)<\/p>\n\n\n balena in Space Talk<\/a> (11.06.2021)<\/p>\n\n 2nd generation apex Mk.2\/Mk.3 studies<\/a><\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n