Wireless as in inductive power? that would certainly be interesting. Might
put some heavy restrictions on what what payloads cubesats could contain,
and could affect magnetorquers substantially
On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 7:20 AM David McMillan <skyefire@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/2/2019 2:41 AM, Jordan Trewitt wrote:
I’m assuming you’d want a umbilical to top off batteries and do last
minute software changes? Probably would want something like a zero
separation force connector or would at least want to check that the
separation force is low enough for the spring to overcome.
Well, the ultimate in zero-force connectors would be wireless. :)
No joke, I've recently seen some *very* nice industrial connectors
that routed 24VDC power (at up to a few hundred mA) *and* a 1-Mb ethernet
connection through a non-physical connection, with a broad air-gap
tolerance (something like 1-10mm, and up to 10deg or so off-axis). The
required hardware on each end was just a large-thumb-sized unit that could
be wired directly to your power/comms without any additional support
hardware.
The use case I saw demonstrated was running power&comms through the
shaft of a CNC spindle without needing slip rings. The particular device
(and I wish I still had the pamphlet!) was spec'd to be immune to several
thousand RPMs around the "long axis" shared by both sides of the connector.
The prices were... well, pretty stiff by hobbyist standards, but
pretty low by the industrial prices I'm accustomed to dealing with.
I'm not sure how the price would compare to licensing a Macintosh
MagSafe connector from Apple. :P
