Concepts

Rocketry in the Round is what my first thought was when looking at electronic bays and payloads for rockets back in the 90s.  I have seen many great looking bays, but most of them were custom built for every rocket.  My life career has been as an electronics engineer and software developer.  Re-useability had been something that I have done for years even before the phrase was coined.  I have never actually made a traditional electronics bay.  I have assisted other people with that, but all of my designs have been modules of some sort that could be moved from rocket to rocket.

Photos from my L3 design in 2002

Building a Fixed Bay circa 2002

The Removeable Bay circa 2002

The Complete Electronics Bay Assembly circa 2002

Other Projects

I have been working with a good good friend of mine with his rocket bay and because of that, I ended up designing parts for his rocket.  I started with initial versions of the deploy feedthrus, connector blocks, and battery holders that you can now find final versions here in the store.

The picture below is one of the electronic bay end plates that is being used in a 5.5" Black Brant style rocket from Mad Cow.  This features a 4 post type of deploy feedthru and a mating connector that ended up being a final design.

Here is the redundant dual deploy sled that connects to the end plate above.

and lastly, the switch and LED indicators on the rocket's outside wall which are not yet store products (if you are interested, please contact me).

No rocket electronics bay design is worth its weight without testing, to satisfy that need, I designed a barochamber that can simulate flights up to 15,000 feet.  It features my own altitude monitoring design in hardware and software that is able to monitor up to four deploy outputs.  The picture below shows the modular bay from BOO... that was under test.  It had just flown to a little over 10,000 feet.  The output is captured in a comma delimited format with time marks, current altitude, max altiude, and finally the four deploy outputs and their state.  You can review the data in Ecel or LirbeOffice Calc and see exactly when and how long the deploy charges were timed along with teh altiude at the events.

and no Barochamber can do what it needs to without a vacuum pump converted from a compressor...

As with anything, concepts are a fluid idea.  I feel that the product line that I have created will change slightly over time, but the basic idea of re-use, reliability, and re-configuration will always be a basis of what I do now and in the future.