ASSEMBLY
BUILD YOUR OWN CUBESAT, FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES
Ten chapters that start with a single Arduino and a blinking LED, build up the electronics you actually need to understand, and end with an exploded, clickable view of every system inside a real 10-centimetre satellite. Scroll to begin.
BEGIN — CHAPTER 01 →A satellite standardised down to a cube
A CubeSat is a satellite built from standard 10×10×10 cm units, called "U." One U is the smallest unit; two or three can be stacked into a 2U or 3U satellite. The standard exists so a huge range of student, hobbyist, and professional satellites can all share the same launch hardware and deployment mechanism — that standardisation is what makes building your own remotely realistic.
This guide builds up the electronics knowledge from scratch, then walks through every system a real 1U CubeSat needs — structure, power, computing, sensing, and communication — before pointing to what an actual first build looks like.
10×10×10 cm — the base unit
Two units stacked — more room for instruments
The most common size flown by student teams
Voltage pushes, resistance resists, current flows
Three quantities describe almost any simple circuit. Voltage is the electrical "push" — how hard electrons are being driven around a loop. Current is how many electrons actually flow past a point per second. Resistance is whatever pushes back against that flow — including the resistor you deliberately add to protect a component like an LED.
Ohm's law ties all three together. Drag the sliders and watch the current — and the LED — respond.
An Arduino, a resistor, an LED, four wires
An Arduino is a small board with a microcontroller — a tiny computer that can turn its pins on and off under program control. Wire an LED and a resistor to one digital pin and ground, and you have the simplest complete circuit in electronics: a closed loop the microcontroller can switch.
This exact circuit — a microcontroller switching a component on and off on a timer — is the direct ancestor of how a CubeSat blinks its status light, fires a deployment mechanism, or wakes up a sensor.
void loop() {
digitalWrite(LED_PIN, HIGH);
delay(500);
digitalWrite(LED_PIN, LOW);
delay(500);
}
Teaching a circuit to notice things
A blinking LED is an output. A satellite also needs inputs — sensors that turn a physical quantity into a voltage a microcontroller can read.
Same principle, very different guarantees
An Arduino is the perfect place to learn the logic every onboard computer (OBC) uses — but a real flight OBC has to survive radiation, temperature swings, and total isolation from a repair technician.
Wire cells for voltage, or wire them for current
Connect solar cells in series (end to end) and their voltages add up, while the current stays the same as a single cell. Connect them in parallel (side by side) and it's the reverse — voltage stays the same, current adds up. Real CubeSat solar panels mix both, tuned to charge a specific battery pack at a specific voltage.
A small onboard battery — usually lithium-ion — stores charge for the roughly 35 minutes of every 90-minute orbit spent in Earth's shadow, when the solar panels produce nothing at all.
SERIES — VOLTAGES ADD
PARALLEL — CURRENTS ADD
A satellite that can't talk is just space debris
Every system from this guide, stacked into one cube
Drag the slider to pull the stack apart, then click any board to see what it does — and which chapter it came from.
No repair truck goes to orbit
From a breadboard on your desk to a rideshare to orbit
Every step here is something you can actually start this weekend.