BIRDS-X APRS Payload
An APRS payload designed around energy-transition messaging, built for the BIRDS-X national space payload competition, where the team won the Phase 1 round.
| Type | APRS satellite payload |
| Result | Phase 1 Winner |
| Theme | Energy transition / renewables |
| PCB Tool | Altium Designer |
| Protocol | AX.25 / APRS Digipeater |
The Payload
The BIRDS-X programme asks teams to design APRS payloads that amplify a chosen social or scientific theme. Ours centred on the energy transition, focusing on planning, management, and renewable adoption to translate a policy question into a small radio artefact that could fly.
The work spanned the full payload stack: hardware on PCB, mechanical accommodation in 3D, orbit-aware operations planning, and image processing for the data the payload would carry.
What We Built
- Payload Hardware (PCB): Schematic, layout, and DFM on the payload PCB, sized for the BIRDS-X form factor and integrated into the host satellite bus. Designed in Altium Designer.
- Mechanical (3D): Mechanical accommodation modelled in 3D; clearance, fasteners, and thermal mounts checked against the bus envelope.
- Orbital Simulation (ORB): Pass timing and station contact windows simulated to drive a realistic operations plan.
- Image Processing (CV): Image-side pipeline tuned for the chosen theme, turning sensor data into things worth downlinking.
Phase 1 Win
The Phase 1 win validated the design choices, which included a focused theme, a clean hardware stack, and an operations plan rooted in real orbit numbers. It also primed the larger CubeSat work that followed (Project P-02) by giving the team a working language across four engineering disciplines simultaneously.