🐈 Always land on your paws! 🐈⬛
Control and Telemetry Systems (CATS) builds open source (hardware and software) flight computers for sounding rockets. Our portfolio includes the CATS Vega flight computer and the CATS Ground Station that can be connected to the flight computer over telemetry. The flight computer can easily be configured through the CATS Configurator, a desktop application. The system allows the user to configure up to 8 actions per flight transition, giving full control over the flight and a safe recovery of your rocket. This repository contains the embedded software for the CATS Vega flight computer, its telemetry module, and the CATS Ground Station.
- Kalman filter altitude and velocity estimation
- Highly configurable events (up to eight actions per flight state transition)
- Backup timers
- High speed logging (up to 100 Hz)
- Telemetry with a range of at least 10 km
- GNSS logging and transmission to the ground station
- Accelerometric liftoff detection
- Fully open source
- Configuration is done over our application, no need to work with a CLI
- Explore rocket flights recorded with CATS flight computers at CATS Flights.
- CATS User Manual
- CATS Configurator downloads
- Firmware releases
- CATS website
- CATS Flights
- Discord community
| Path | Description |
|---|---|
flight_computer |
CATS Vega flight-control firmware for the STM32F411 |
telemetry |
Onboard radio and GNSS telemetry firmware for the STM32G071 |
ground_station |
CATS Ground Station firmware for the ESP32-S2 |
docs |
Typst sources, fonts, and assets for the CATS User Manual |
.github/workflows |
Automated formatting, building, linting, and artifact generation |
The CATS Configurator our desktop application used to configure Vega and work with recorded flight data. It provides access to the flight configuration, events, timers, testing functions, advanced CLI, and flight-log visualization.
Download the latest version from the CATS Configurator releases page. Instructions are available in the CATS User Manual.
The firmware projects use PlatformIO. Install the repository’s pinned PlatformIO version with:
python -m pip install -r requirements.txtBuild all three firmware projects from the repository root:
platformio run -d flight_computer
platformio run -d telemetry
platformio run -d ground_stationTo build the Flight Computer firmware using its debug environment:
platformio run -d flight_computer --environment debugPull requests are automatically checked for formatting, build errors, and static-analysis warnings.
Contributions are welcome. Examples include:
- Implementing firmware features
- Fixing bugs
- Improving documentation
- Reporting hardware or software issues
- Suggesting new features
Before submitting a pull request, make sure the affected firmware project builds successfully. The continuous-integration workflow will run formatting, compilation, and static-analysis checks.
For questions and development discussions, join the CATS Discord community.
This software is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 and is provided without warranty.
Parts of the Flight Computer CLI and embedded FAT implementation were adapted from Betaflight and Cleanflight. Thanks to their contributors for making that work available.
Here is a quick overview of our system, in the form of a poster that we presented at the 26th ESA PAC Symposium.
