Rapid development of a balloon-borne CDH system using COTS electronics and open source software

Open source tools and readily available consumer hardware offer many advantages over the typical, custom designs used for control and data handling (CDH) and electronic power systems (EPS), especially in applications where the development time is measured in months, not years. This paper highlights the development of the CDH and EPS systems for the UV-Visible optics bench onboard the Balloon Rapid Response to Comet ISON (BRRISON) balloon gondola, a 5 month effort from conception to flight. The system was designed to power, operate, and collect data from an optical bench which included a fine-steering mirror motion compensation system, one high speed scientific CMOS camera, a science-grade CCD, a fold mirror mechanism, a filter wheel, and an active thermal heating element. To enable rapid development of a system with such complex and diverse requirements, a strategy was employed to use open source and consumer products. SwRI constructed a flight-ready power system designed around an Arduino microcontroller board, and a data collection system which includes a desktop motherboard running Ubuntu Linux onboard a recent Intel processor. The result is a highly portable, modular system which is efficient and inexpensive to reproduce for future high altitude balloon missions. This paper discusses the benefits and challenges SwRI faced using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and open source software for rapid development.