110 Sabertooth and Eagle products but with a completely redone base board, to bring in the additional storage and expansion options. The biggest challenge in the work to make Swift was space; it’s always a huge effort to realise the layout you want, to get the routing correct, to bring the PCI signalling off the connectors and down to the base board and make it all fit. It’s physically difficult to get all the sockets where you need them on a board this small.” Systel attended the show to unveil its new Badger rugged computer, developed as an industrial-grade edge AI processing solution. “We wanted to bring something with the edge computing power of a Jetson Orin NX, as per our Sparrow product, but price it affordably for commercial and industrial markets, and still have it be a ruggedised, IP67rated system,” explained Brian Russell. In addition to integrating the Orin NX, the Badger is also designed with native Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link, a protocol popular among cameras and other sensors in commercial autonomy, and a wi-fi modem for integrations requiring wireless downlink from or uplink to the system. “Badger’s first big engineering challenge was finding the right form factor of COTS chassis to design it around: using a COTS chassis rather than a custom designed and milled metal chassis was critical for keeping unit costs down,” Russell said. “The next extensive challenge was designing a carrier board that would have all the capabilities we wanted. For that, we actually worked with Connect Tech, who were very helpful with bringing out the signals and other things we wanted from the carrier board. For DoD products, we generally design our own carrier boards but to optimise the system for cost and speed, and other specs we wanted, Connect Tech were incredibly helpful.” The lion’s share of ruggedisation work revolved around trialling different cooling fans, at varying speeds, to maximise the system’s thermal tolerances and cooling efficiency when running at max performance in hot environments. Validation tests of the system have passed muster, and production is expected to commence in summer 2024. Harwin displayed many solutions including its new Flecto Floating Connectors series, which are designed for enabling multiple board-to-board connectors on a single PCB. “With traditional board-to-board rigid connectors, you run into issues with tolerance stack-ups, because even submillimetre misalignment risks damaging connectors, putting stress on the board, and similar problems,” explained Ben Neumann. “In Flecto, the male connector can float slightly in place, up to 0.5 mm in most of the series - though some offer greater floating range - allowing the board-to-board connection to function as intended, even with minor misalignments, without putting stress on the connector or board.” The floating capability stems from the connectors being designed around spring-type contacts, which gives a measure of elasticity and provides structural load distribution away from the pins and joints of each connector. The Flecto connectors are available in a variety of forms, including three different pitches (0.5 mm, 0.635 mm and 0.8 mm), pin counts of up to 160 contacts, various stacking heights, and with signal or power connections (including 3 A pins for a 0.5 mm pitch design). Sky Power has developed a reduction gearbox for integration with its SP-210 and SP-275 two-stroke engines. “The gearbox is engineered with a 3:1 reduction ratio, and the first tests have been completed with a 33x40 variablepitch propeller,” said Karsten Schudt. “Running the engines at 9000 rpm, we got 3000 rpm at the propeller output as well as immense torque, to the point that we found the propeller is still too small to fully utilise the engine’s torque gain.” The gearbox adds 1.5 kg to the engine, which itself weighs 6-10 kg depending on configuration, in return for tripling the torque output. Though designed for a customer-specific request, Sky Power is June/July 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Systel’s Badger rugged computer is designed to provide the edge computing power of a Jetson Orin NX in a ruggedised, IP67-rated package, while staying affordable to commercial and industrial users Harwin’s Flecto Floating Connectors are designed for enabling multiple board-to-board connectors on a single PCB
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