Space like environement computing

[PhysicsNstuff]

Hi everyone,

I got a problem that i believe most of you guys never saw before. I need to choose a cpu/motherboard for a computer that will be operating in space-like environment for a short (10hours) mission. I already got a computer in my lab but its cpu (i7-7700K) is quite a bit too high on the heat dissipation side. I would need a much lower tdp so that conduction cooling would be enough, as you may remember space means no air so i will send the heat of the cpu into the structure of the aircraft. I said this for you guys to understand that tdp is critical in my application.

 

1: Is it possible to use a i7-7700T instead of the i7-7700K that i got?  My motherboard says that it is supported (asus p10s ws) but the it employee in here said that those cpu are meant for mobile devices and that we cant use them in a consumer/workstation grade motherboard, witch i find really confusing.

 

2: I saw that really recently the i7-8700T came out with the same tdp but a higher performance, lets say i get this board (ASUS Prime H370M-Plus/CSM) would i be able to use this one cpu?

 

3: For any of those two cpu, does using Ubuntu16 would give me some fatal compatibility issues? During the mission the computer will be in non-graphical mode but having it available for debug would be nice.

 

If you guys can add some explanations/sources to your answers it would be perfect.

[Crunchy Dragon]

1. The 7700T should be able to work in place of the 7700K.
2. As long as it's a 300-series chipset, you should be able to use any 8th Gen CPU on it.
3. I've never heard of compatibility issues with Ubuntu.

Welcome to the forums!

 

May I ask, why is the computer operating in a space-like environment? I'm intrigued by this.

[PhysicsNstuff]

As part of my masters in physics we will send a 14 inch telescope on a stratospheric baloon. The computer will control the telescope self pointing, adaptive optics and cameras included in the system.

 

Pm me if you want more info.

[Mira Yurizaki]

So if I'm reading this right, you want to build a computer to send into space, or at least the upper atmosphere, and have it do some work from some data gathering sensor.

 

I'm going to list a few things about what I'm seeing here:

• If this is a data collection satellite (for lack of a better word), it should not be doing any heavy lifting computationally. It should at most pre-process the data and send it down. Consider this: the New Horizon's probe runs on a CPU that the original PlayStation used.
• Since you listed a battery life requirement (10 hours), you have to heavily consider the power consumption of your hardware. This directly affects how big of a battery you need to send up with the parts, which affects how much weight the payload is.
• When sending anything up, you have to consider the weight of the payload. If your balloon is only capable of lifting a handful of kilograms, you're already hosed trying to pack a 35W system into it.
• And it may not be that big of a concern, but at higher elevations up to outer space, high energy radiation becomes a real problem for electronics. Hardening may not be feasible, but simpler hardware is less prone to failure than more complex hardware.

18 minutes ago, PhysicsNstuff said:

As part of my masters in physics we will send a 14 inch telescope on a stratospheric baloon. The computer will control the telescope self pointing, adaptive optics and cameras included in the system.

Given what the computer in the payload needs to do, what you were considering in your OP is the equivalent of killing a fly with an FAEB. A Raspberry Pi should be enough to do this.

[PhysicsNstuff]

10 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

• If this is a data collection satellite (for lack of a better word), it should not be doing any heavy lifting computationally. It should at most pre-process the data and send it down. Consider this: the New Horizon's probe runs on a CPU that the original PlayStation used.
• Since you listed a battery life requirement (10 hours), you have to heavily consider the power consumption of your hardware. This directly affects how big of a battery you need to send up with the parts, which affects how much weight the payload is.
• When sending anything up, you have to consider the weight of the payload. If your balloon is only capable of lifting a handful of kilograms, you're already hosed trying to pack a 35W system into it.
• And it may not be that big of a concern, but at higher elevations up to outer space, high energy radiation becomes a real problem for electronics. Hardening may not be feasible, but simpler hardware is less prone to failure than more complex hardware.

• Adaptive optics systems goals is to correct wavefront aberrations in real time to have a clear image ( go see wikipedia's page). This means that the processing needs to be done in real time. The PlayStation cpu would just not do it.
• I never talked about battery life, only heat dissipation. Battery life is not a concern in here as i have some headroom, especially if i choose a low tdp cpu.
• The whole system will weight more than 2 tons.
• Im stuck with complex hardware, it is and will stay a risk. The real threats are byte flips from cosmic rays but considering that the mission only lasts for 10 hours we will live with it.

I do understand your assumptions but as you can read you largely underestimated the amount of computation that needs to be done. For a small example the first adaptive optics stage will have to process a 128x128 image and send corrections to the tip-tilt mirror at a 100hz frequency, a Raspberry Pi would compute itself to death trying to do this kind of work. Plus there is other requirements i did not listed out of simplicity.