Banner Image: Mars Helicopter Technology Demonstration, Credit: NASA HQ

Upcoming Events

April 11
2025

F Prime Tutorial

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, California
April 22-23
2025

F Prime Tutorial

Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California
August 10
2025

F Prime Tutorial

Small Satellite Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah
October 13-15
2025

Flight Software Development Workshop

Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California

Information and Registration

Overview

F Prime (F´) is a component-driven ecosystem that enables rapid development and deployment of spaceflight and other embedded software applications. Originally developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, F´ has been successfully deployed on several space applications. It is tailored but not limited to small-scale spaceflight systems such as CubeSats, SmallSats, and instruments.

Learn More

Image Credit: ISS RapidScat, NASA JSC, Alexander Gerst

Getting Started

To get started with F´, follow the installation guide. Then follow our tutorials, or inspect our reference applications.

Learn More
This artist's concept shows the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, a six-unit CubeSat designed to search for ice on the Moon's surface using special lasers.

Image: Lunar Flashlight, Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Group of people in classroom learning about F Prime

Image: F Prime Tutorial, Credit: F Prime

Support

F´ provides robust documentation and access to the user community. You can also support F´ by contributing to the codebase and reporting issues.

Learn More

Tutorials

Tutorials walk through the essentials of F Prime development, starting with the canonical HelloWorld example and progressing to cross-compiling and deploying on hardware.

Visit Tutorials

  • Hello World

    The Hello World tutorial shows how to create an F Prime project and how to design, implement, and test a basic F Prime component. We recommend that new users of F Prime start with this tutorial.

    Hello World

  • LED Blinker

    The LED Blinker tutorial shows how to develop an F Prime project that runs on embedded hardware. It covers manager components, hardware drivers, and cross compilation, with the goal of blinking an LED on ARM hardware. This tutorial introduces the F Prime concepts of events, telemetry, commands, and parameters.

    LED Blinker

  • Math Component

    The Math Component tutorial shows how to construct an F Prime application with user-defined ports and data types. It covers more advanced uses of events, telemetry, commands, and parameters. It also covers unit testing of F Prime components.

    Math Component

How-To

How-To guides offer step-by-step instructions for specific development tasks in F Prime.

Visit How-To Guides

User Manual

The User Manual dives into F Prime design philosophy and architectural principles, providing a deep understanding of how the framework operates.

Visit User Manual