Roger M. A. Peel

Experiences Gained from the first Prêt à Voter Implementation

Implementing an electronic voting system for the first time can be difficult, since requirements are sometimes hard to specify and keep changing, resources are scarce in an academic setting, the gap between theory and practice is wider than anticipated, adhering to a formal development lifecycle is inconvenient and delivery on time is very hard. This paper describes all of the work done by the Pr^et `a Voter team in the run-up to VoComp in 2007 and enumerates a number of lessons learned.

The I/O-Boards

This chapter provides the technical description of the system’s I/O-Boards and the CCSDS-Boards for telecommand decoding and telemetry encoding. The approach for these two OBC components is a common design for the printed circuit boards of both board types, just with differing chip population. Both of these board types are available with singleredundancy inside the OBC and are connected to the two OBC Processor-Boards via cross coupled SpaceWire links running RMAP protocol. A key characteristic is that although implementing completely different functionalities both boards are based on the same 3U printed circuit board, FPGA chip and I/O driver ICs design.