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Entry  24 Sep 2018, Devin Burke, Forum, Implementing MIDAS on a Satellite 
    Reply  25 Sep 2018, Stefan Ritt, Forum, Implementing MIDAS on a Satellite 
       Reply  25 Sep 2018, Devin Burke, Forum, Implementing MIDAS on a Satellite 
          Reply  26 Dec 2018, Konstantin Olchanski, Forum, Implementing MIDAS on a Satellite 
Message ID: 1402     Entry time: 25 Sep 2018     In reply to: 1401     Reply to this: 1421
Author: Devin Burke 
Topic: Forum 
Subject: Implementing MIDAS on a Satellite 
> > Hello Everybody,
> > 
> > I am a member of a satellite team with a scientific payload and I am considering
> > coordinating the payload using MIDAS. This looks to be challenging since MIDAS
> > would be implemented on an Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA with minimal hardware
> > resources. The idea would be to install a soft processor on the Spartan 6 and
> > run MIDAS through UCLinux either on the FPGA or boot it from SPI Flash. Does
> > anybody have any comments on how feasible this would be or perhaps have
> > experience implementing a similar system?
> > 
> > -Devin
> 
> While some people successfully implemented a midas *client* in an FPGA softcore, the full midas 
> backend would probably not fit into a Spartan 6. Having done some FPGA programming and 
> working on satellites, I doubt that midas would be well suited for such an environment. It's 
> probably some kind of overkill. The complete GUI is likely useless since you want to minimize your 
> communication load on the satellite link.
> 
> Stefan

Thank you for your comment Stefan. We do have some hardware resources on the board such as RAM, ROM and
Flash storage so we wouldn't necessarily have to virtualize everything. Ideally we would like a
completed and compressed file to be produced on board and regularly sent back to ground without
requiring remote access. MIDAS is appealing to us because its easily automated but we wouldn't
necessarily need functions like a GUI or web interface. Part of the discussion now is whether or not a
microblaze processor would be sufficient or if we need a dedicted ARM processor.

Devin 
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