AURORA

AURORA (AUxspace ROcket opeRAting System) is a Zephyr RTOS-based avionics firmware for rockets, developed by Auxspace e.V..

It manages sensor data, flight state detection, and pyrotechnic ignition across multiple interconnected boards communicating over CAN bus.

AURORA itself is made up of several key components:

  • applications

  • boards

  • drivers

  • libraries

  • tests

  • tools

As depicted in the Application Development guide from the Zephyr Project Documentation, AURORA acts as a Zephyr freestanding application.

AURORA Libraries and Drivers

The core parts of AURORA are its libraries and drivers, that can be used by any Zephyr Application with simple #include <aurora/...> statements, devicetree overlays and Kconfigs.

Libraries are located at lib while drivers can be found in the drivers directory.

Their public APIs are documented in the API-Reference, including the library and the driver APIs.

AURORA Applications

Applications use libraries and drivers to function. An example is the sensor_board application, that acts as a flight computer using IMU and barometric pressure data and deploying a parachute when rocket apogee is detected.

Since application’s use cases vary, Kconfigs and Devicetree Overlays are used to customize the application’s function for each board. Some boards may have additional pyro ignitions or the capability to signal state machine changes on a buzzer while others perform communication tasks over CANbus and use redundant sensor data (e.g. High G Accelerometer combined with the standard 6 or 9-DoF IMU).

Project

Flight Logs

Indices and tables