rocketsam2016
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- Joined
- Aug 31, 2016
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Unless you completely sealed up the little hole in the pressure sensor (which would be very hard to do) it's unlikely that your plastic shield had anything to do with it. I'm assuming that the battery/switch/ematches were the same as your previous flight and your ground test, so they should have been adequate. Since your wires were soldered to the board that leaves either the battery or switch disconnecting in flight as the likely culprit. What did you do to keep the battery wires and connectors from flopping around and becoming disconnected in flight?
Thanks for the great questions, I really appreciate it. Keep 'em coming
All battery connections (JST) were taped based on advice from your manuals . I taped the JST connection, and then taped the battery wires with gaffers tape to the underside of the board.
Battery, switch, ematches are identical to previous flight. Battery and ematches are identical to what I've used successfully many times in another rocket (and where I used less care in preventing floppiness).
You can see in the picture above in post #146 - almost all wires pass through precisely fit holes in the mounting board so that there is little slack on the parts leading up to solder joints. This was a pretty low stress flight too - 6Gs of acceleration, max speed 620fps. It seems very unlikely to have both circuits disabled under such a flight by failed solder joints.
There are plug connections that connect the switches to the board, and connect the drogue charges to the board (the main charges are hard wired from altimeter to charge with only soldered connections). The plugs are mounted orthogonal to the flight direction though, and are a highly recommended type (anderson powerpole) by folks on this board including bob krech, and they take a fair bit of force (12lbs by spec the way I used them) to unplug. Further, the plugs are physically separate for each circuit, so they would both have to unplug independently to disable both circuits.