The photo only poorly renders the magnificence of what is happening here: the left diode of this STM32 based development board is actually BLINKING!

… What? A LED blinking software? Is that REALLY what we have been working on during these past few days? Don’t we have better than that to do?

Well, what you don’t know is that in the present case, this simple piece of software was not on the FLASH memory at first, and the LED was not blinking when the STM32 booted. Where did this new code come from, then? From these two orange and yellow wires, connecting the STM32 UART interface to a laptop. Yes, the program was transferred through this exact same interface that will connect the payload to the main computer of the satellite!

What this all means is that we will be able to update and/or reprogram the payload while in-flight! This will be used to correct the bugs to add some exciting new functionalities that we have yet to imagine!

Uh-oh. Did I just lose the perfect excuse to actually go up there with my JTAG connector?