The OpenC3 team had a great time attending this year’s SmallSat conference at the end of August. We were excited to catch up with customers and hear about their current and planned missions, we got to show off some new COSMOS capabilities and plugins, and we even saw business partners and fellow exhibitors showing how they use COSMOS in the field at their booths. We’re grateful for such excellent endorsements of our command and control software. 

It was an action-packed few days of conversations and meetings. We made sure our booth always had an opportunity for attendees to see OpenC3 COSMOS in action, whether on the test bench to streamline satellite validation or controlling non-aerospace hardware. We might have to look into getting our robot dog certified as a service animal so we can take it to more events. It was more popular than the people staffing our booth. 

If you didn't get a chance to stop by or want a recap of everything we showcased, here’s a look at what we demonstrated at SmallSat (and spoiler alert: what we’ll demo at Space Software Summit, October 5-7).

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COSMOS Core: The Best (and Free) Way to Prove the Software

We know the frustration that comes with a trial version of software or a new tool when it locks you out, uses dummy data, or forces you to submit billing info before you know if it even works. We skip all that by offering COSMOS Core as free, open source software.

We had a fun demo at our booth showing how to get started with COSMOS Core to deploy a robust, enterprise-grade C2 software without spending a penny from a closely-watched budget. Our engineers showed how teams can go from initial installation to commanding real and simulated targets in just a few minutes. If you’re prototyping a new payload, our free, open source offering provides full telemetry monitoring, command processing, and scripting capabilities.

You could also opt to mimic our engineers by using the software to control LED lights or control a robot dog! COSMOS talks to pretty much any hardware. We just specialize in aerospace hardware—for now. 

Want to test COSMOS for yourself? Get COSMOS Core for free!

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Test Bench Demo Featuring Keysight Hardware

Hardware-in-the-loop testing is critical long before a payload ever meets a launch vehicle. At our booth, we hosted a live test bench demo powered by hardware from Keysight Technologies.

We’ve built many COSMOS plugins for their hardware and have an excellent partnership with them to help operators validate their hardware on the bench. In fact, the entire test rack becomes controllable from COSMOS in a few clicks. And even better? The exact same software used to command Keysight hardware on the test bench is used to command the actual satellite in orbit.

Historically, COSMOS users wrote their own plugins for every piece of equipment on the bench—power supply, digital multimeter, oscilloscope, power switch, whatever the rack held. Every team rebuilt the same integrations, and none of that work was shared. Together, we publish those plugins for Keysight products so integration takes minutes instead of weeks, and nobody writes the same driver twice.

Thanks to our friends at Keysight for bringing the test equipment and letting us show booth visitors just how easy it is to connect Keysight hardware to COSMOS. 

Learn more about our partnership with Keysight Technologies and the COSMOS plugins built specifically for their hardware. Read the blog!

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Behind the Scenes: Building the Hale Plugin

We can’t take all the credit for the cool plugins we develop as we recently had a partner come to us with an idea for a COSMOS plugin that we quickly built and deployed to our app store. Hale, a frontier forecasting and space weather company, wanted a custom integration within COSMOS for their customers. So we built it. And we used it as an example of what goes into building a plugin at SmallSat. 

At the booth, we walked developers through the process of building a plugin from scratch. The Hale plugin was built to optimize mission performance and extend satellites’ lifespans by pulling in space weather data and using COSMOS to create scripts to act on that data. 

Read the full story on this collaboration: OpenC3 COSMOS & Hale: Working to Improve Satellite Lifespan, Efficiency, and Value. 

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NASA’s F’ Open Source Flight Software Demo

COSMOS has been open sourced and widely adapted for over a decade. It’s one of our core values to support the open source engineering community. At SmallSat, we demonstrated how easy it is to get up and running with Core, but we also talked about another open source flight software framework, NASA’s F’ (F Prime). F’ makes it easy for satellite operators to develop, test, and deploy flight software without having to write it from scratch. Sounds familiar to our team. Popular with university cube sat programs, F’ is ideal for missions that operate autonomously and have limited resources or engineers. 

OpenC3 welcomed NASA JPL engineers and university satellite operators to the booth for an in-depth demo of  how COSMOS seamlessly integrates with F', providing a robust and straightforward C2 solution. It was great meeting with developers who also champion open source software development and work collectively to improve open source software. 

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COSMOS Isn’t Just for Space: The MAVLink integration

While a nod to space is in our name, COSMOS is fundamentally a universal software. To demonstrate this versatility, we showcased our integration with MAVLink which is the industry-standard messaging protocol for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones.

Attendees saw how COSMOS can ingest real-time flight telemetry, display custom drone dashboards, and operate onboard payloads just as easily as satellites.

Interested in how the protocol mapping works under the hood? Read our technical breakdown: COSMOS MAVLink Deep Dive.

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Walking the Dog with COSMOS

Time to see the star of the COSMOS show: The COSMOS-controlled robot dog. Not only was it fun to show a new type of hardware COSMOS can talk to, it was also fun to hear about OpenC3 CEO Ryan Melton’s experience integrating brand new hardware with COSMOS to control it. All that dev work was worth it though to see the dog’s smooth moves on our makeshift dance floor!

See the sneak peek of the dog we shared on LinkedIn and YouTube!

We’re already looking forward to SmallSat 2027, but in the meantime we will be doing these demos again real soon. This time at our own conference, Space Software Summit! Join us in Westminster, CO, October 5-7, for three days of space software talks with the brightest minds in the industry. Speakers are joining us from BAE Systems, Kayhan Space, Sandia National Laboratories, KSAT, Orbit Fab, Red Canyon Software, Sim Dot Space, and other innovative aerospace companies. On the agenda you’ll find sessions on AI, Flight Software, Architecture, Simulation, Algorithms, and more. This is the premier engineering conference exploring the latest innovations in aerospace software. 

‍Learn more and register for Space Software Summit.