I am working on some fairly advanced rockets with a friend - we are currently using conventional high power rockets as test beds, but the goal is to get into much higher performance regimes (our wildest dreams have us building rotons). One of the threads of our efforts is to get some intelligence into the rockets. The normal way to do this would be to build custom PC boards for this, that, and the other thing. However, I am intrigued with the possibility of using a general purpose computer with A/D interfaces for sensors and controls. I know that launchable computers are not the primary focus of this group, but as a long-term lurker, it seems pretty clear to me that a lot of the same issues exist. The parameters for the space available is that it is as long as it needs to be, 6 inches in diameter, and the whole system will be subject to lots of G's (like in the low hundreds range, depending on motors, etc). Are there wearable systems that people have worked with that will stand up to this regime? I envision an OS that can run out of RAM (I would guess that a disk is unlikely to survive), and a PC board that will probably have to be potted to tolerate the forces. Compute power is presumably not a significant issue - I ran a TI micro system almost 20 years ago that had enough cycles to do this stuff (although the OS was BASIC, so presumably something real will require a little more horsepower). If anyone has suggestions (OS, processor, A/D interfaces, etc), I would love to hear them. Jim Stiles
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