HIVE Avionics

HIVE, or Hopper Integrated Vehicle Electronics, is LPL's fully custom avionics PCB stack for the Ranger vehicle. It consists of a stack of 4 boards: the feed system board, the GNC board, the low-power connector board, and the high-power connector board. Taking inspiration from the traditional PC/104 layout, the HIVE boards are stacked horizontally so connectors can be placed on the left and right sides for signals and power to come in and out. 

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The HIVE stack is capable of high-speed data acquisition, autonomous vehicle control, and wireless communication with the ground. The sensing capabilities include 16 feed system sensors (pressure transducers or thermocouples), 1 IMU, 1 RTK GNSS, and 2 LIDARs. Meshing the data from all of these sensors allows the HIVE to precisely predict the state of the vehicle. From there, it is able to utilize its various output interfaces to control the vehicle. On the control side, it has capabilities for up to 20 on-board feed system solenoid valves, thrust vector control actuators, and throttling actuators.

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The feed system board and GNC board are the two “smart” boards in the stack. They contain identical PMUs, or processing and memory units. The PMU has a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M7 processor with speeds up to 480 MHz. It also contains 8GB of non-volatile memory for high-fidelity data logging. In addition to the PMU, the feed system board contains high-speed Ethernet, 915 MHz RF communications, and the GNC board contains interfaces for a high precision IMU and RTK GNSS.