Hello, I build high power rockets with the rocket club at my university. We keep running into wire management issues with our electronic payloads. We are trying to build a modular payload system where different boards can be added or removed from the system and data is sent to a motherboard over a UART bus. We would like the system to work in different sizes of rocket, with the smallest diameter being 2 inches(internal diameter of about 1.8 inches). It would be interesting if someone could come up with a way to fix this problem. We have considered a couple options listed below.
Mateing boards: male connector on one board, female on the other. This design limits how boards can be arranged.
Cables: connector on each board(more than one on the add on boards to allow for continuation of the bus) with some sort of cable to connect them. This system would be very cluttered, but allows boards to be oriented as desired.
Full Body Bus: Some sort of cable is run down the entire length of the rocket with connectors at convenient locations. This system would be useful if we have to ignite charges during flight, or communicate with sensors in other parts of the rocket. The problem with this concept is that we have no idea how to implement it. We would need to shield the bus in areas where we would be igniting charges, have breakaway(shielded) connectors where the rocket would separate, and find a way to get past pistons(this one seems almost impossible).
