An award-winning app for microsatellites

Two iCompetence students developed an app that can be used to present data from the Swiss microsatellite "SwissCube" in an easy-to-understand way.

Based in the municipality of Kappel in the canton of Solothurn with sites in Darmstadt and Rome, Solenix develops software solutions for the aerospace industry. A product created by the company is the "ELVETI" Mission Control System, which also manages the data from the first Swiss satellite "SwissCube". Expanding on "ELVETI", students were commissioned to present the information on a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.

SignalR is used to display the data to clients in real-time. Tthe "SignalR Hub" was implemented as a web application on an IIS server for performing tasks such as authentication and data encryption.

The user interface has been designed such that it is native for the respective platform and implements the requirements set out in the design guides for Android and iOS. The "Xamarin.Forms" framework and accordingly C# and XAML were used for programming. To present position data as well as a 3D model of the satellite, the 2D engine and 3D engine of Xamarin were used respectively.

The resulting application offers interested users an efficient way to access images and general information on the SwissCube mission as well as real-time data from SwissCube. As "Mission Controller", it is possible to register with a login in order to receive raw values for the data. The app can be generically expanded for other CubeSat missions and will likely be used for the QB50 missions.

Project information

• Client: Solenix GmbH
• Project team: Annika Winterhalter, Joep Neijt
• Supervision: Prof. Dr. Martin Melchior, Samuel von Stachelski