BOLT (Beamed Optical Light Transmission)

BOLT explores the usage of LiFi for Intra-Satellite Communications in real world scenarios. We want to address the current weaknesses of LiFi, building on the research of Project SatelLight.

This repository contains the flight software, ground station, and supporting infrastructure for BOLT missions developed by TUHH Orbital Research at Hamburg University of Technology.

What to Expect From This Code

BOLT is a student project, and this repository is as much a place to learn engineering as it is a payload. Read it with that in mind: parts of it are the second or third rewrite by someone who learned the topic on this project, and open problems live in the issues and docs instead of being polished away.

What we hold ourselves to is not polish but verifiability: the system invariants state what must hold, scripts/verify.sh checks everything a machine can check, and the decision records say why things are the way they are. If you reuse something from here, treat it as a starting point you verify yourself, not as a certified component.

Currently Flying

THHOR-BOLT REXUS 37 - Three-experiment LiFi technology demonstrator on a REXUS sounding rocket.

What's in This Repository

Software

• flight-software/ - Embedded code for STM32-based flight computers
• interfaces/ - The wire contract: annotated headers as the single source for the packet schema, the ICDs and the decoders (C++26 reflection)
• telemetry-tools/ - Rust decoding stack (bolt-codec, serial bridge, post-flight export) and the Bolt VS Code extension for live and post-flight telemetry
• ground-station/ - Telemetry reception, dashboards, and operations tools
• scripts/ - The verify gate (verify.sh) and repository tooling

Documentation

• overview.md - Mission overview
• architecture.md - System architecture
• docs/ - All project documentation
  • interfaces/ - Interface Control Documents (ICDs)
  • decisions/ - Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)
  • standards/ - Coding, documentation, and process standards
  • handbook/ - Team handbook and onboarding
  • guides/ - How-to guides

Related Repositories

• bolt-hil - Hardware-in-the-Loop test platform
• bolt-flight-analytics - Post-flight data analysis tools

Getting Started

For New Contributors

Start with our onboarding guide. It will walk you through environment setup, our standards, and how to make your first contribution.

For Curious Visitors

To understand what we build and why:

1. Read the current mission overview
2. Look at the system architecture
3. Browse our Architecture Decision Records for engineering rationale

For Returning Contributors

• Latest open issues
• Current discussions
• See CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution workflow

About BOLT

BOLT is a Hamburg Space Team project investigating LiFi for intra-satellite communication. For the full mission rationale, the three experiments, and the science objectives, see overview.md.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from team members and external contributors. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for our community standards.

Security

For security issues, please see SECURITY.md. Do not report security vulnerabilities through public GitHub issues.

Contact

• General: bolt@hamburgspace.de
• Security: security@hamburgspace.de
• Code of Conduct: conduct@hamburgspace.de