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Thought of using ribbon cable for this (initially thought 18 conductors together for 2 drives on one side). suggested IDC punch down connectors for ribbon end. Not sure what it would mate to on board end… wires soldered onto an IDC header?
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thought this was overkill and just shove 9 separate wires through. He also suggested USB for the red interconnect, though it’s not meant for this use case.
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One interesting thing… the orange stepper female 3-pin futaba connector is what’s needed at the board end. The cable is even long enough and fits through aluminum strut. I may be able to just make A/B a 6-conductor problem instead of 9.
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And for the 4+2 N20 problem, the cables at either end are not long enough but together the should do the trick. Remember this sketch is ~ to scale. If so, no red cable/connectors may be needed at all.
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The main reason to try and create a “middle mile” interconnect (the red bits) is modularity and swappability. I could swap out drive units easily, exchange boards, mix and match undercarriages.
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Farthest out of my wheelhouse: rest of the wire harness for peripheral and payload function. There are 8 GPIO pins I can make good use of, but the bus options (CAN, UART, SP1, I2C) are black-magic to me. Where might a camera go?
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Replying to
Actually wondering about the camera too. Was considering the same single board for a imaging instrument prototype, but lack of the right direct cam interface has me looking at a different one and a accessory motor controller.
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