Sun Sensor Initial Design

[RobertPendergrast]

The satellite needs sun sensors in order to determine the relative angle of the sun so that it can angle its solar pannels for maximum power efficiency. Instead of buying a sunsensor, we want to design our own with a total cost of <= $300. The scope of this task is to research and propose an initial design for our sunsensor that will be able to determine where the sun is.

• First Step:
  Determining the physical characteristics of our sun sensor
  There are a few different designs that we can deploy for the sun sensor. This blog post overviews a few of them. We want to determine the type of sun sensor that works best for us.

  Note that the most likely design will be a coarse sun sensor (css) with 6 photodiodes (one on each face) but it would be nice to see some alternatives.

  Deliverable: Physical Model for the Sun Sensor(s), what types of sensors, how many, where they go, anything else needed to build this

• Second Step :
  Determining the hardware interface
  Once we know what hardware for the sun sensor we will need, we need to figure out how we are going to retreive its data. Determine how we can do this.

• Third Step:
  Writing the software to collect the sensor data and determine the sun angle
  Once the hardware is obtained we need to create an FPrime component to read the data from the respective channels and calculate the relative angle of the sun.

[moisesmata]

@RobertPendergrast Okay if @tk3144 and I tackle this?