[TriLUG] Dealing with bit flips from cosmic rays

[Charles West via TriLUG]

Hello!

TL:DR:  Are there software ways to harden a Raspberry Pi Zero against bit
flips?

I've been looking into space craft design and found some interesting things
related to computing for space missions.  The common way to do computation
is to have special hardened hardware that can handle a lot more radiation.
These things can mass kilograms and run at ~200 mHz while costing $200,000+.

This has been fine as long as launch costs are really high, but are likely
to be a bigger part of the cost as launches get cheaper (looking at you,
Starship).  This has me wondering if you could shrink the Pi zero form
factor as much as possible (though it's already pretty small) and spend the
mass on thick/cheap rad shielding.  This would eliminate most of the low
energy radiation.

However, cosmic radiation is really hard to stop.  You will sometimes get
bit flips and more serious failures.  If I may ask, do you have any ideas
on how you could harden the system against software errors?  Could you
store/retrieve from RAM with forward error correction?  Maybe scan and
correct flash storage with forward error correction and then reboot
occasionally?

What do you think?

Thanks,
Charlie