Project Strix

Project Strix is the avionics system for Martlet IV. Originally conceived as a direct successor to the Martlet III avionics system, issues stemming from the 2020-21 silicon shortage and backported features from Project Rooster resulted in a completely novel system architecture, and fancy new name.

The system is designed as a single-board flight computer, composed of a single microcontroller linked to several independent subsystems. Each of these systems is explored in detail below, but the key components are:

• The power supply and battery charger

• A dual-output clock distribution system
• A redundant altimeter
• The telemetry radio and GPS system
• Recovery pyrotechnics fire control
• An engine sensor datalogging interface
• Two serial interfaces

• The Central Processor

The boad is controlled by a single STM32F405RGT6 microcontroller. This chip, powered by a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4, runs the core state machine in addition to several functions pertaining to each subsystem, including altitude estimation, data sampling and logging, telemetry and telecommand handlingm and PSU and Battery Management.