- Mon Aug 27, 2012 8:57 am
#148946
I'm designing a little project which involves lots of square PCBs that get tiled together and communicate with each other in a de-centralized fashion. My question is about designing the interconnects. Each tile (pcb) will have (probably) 12 connections on each side (tiles can be rotated in any orientation and will still behave appropriately).
How would you design these connections so that each tile can be placed and connected easily, without wires or extra parts.
Things I'm imagining:
1) vertical pads the protrude slightly from the edge of the board with a magnet to hold the tiles together
2) perform all communication with IR photodiodes/leds
3) some sort of inductive coupling? (would need to be tiny, might get noisy with all those connections?)
The criteria for a good solution:
1) Cheap: as cheap as possible
2) Readily available: goes hand-in-hand with cheap I think
3) Physically reliant on PCB only: Although these tiles may eventually be cased, the interconnect shouldn't rely physically on the case in any way
4) Should not protrude from tile very much: The tiles should be connectable easily in any configuration, sliding a tile into an inside corner, dropping a tile into a hole, etc. This precludes pins and sockets.
Anyone know of anything like this that's commercially available? Perhaps some battery tabs that could be mangled to this purpose?
How would you design these connections so that each tile can be placed and connected easily, without wires or extra parts.
Things I'm imagining:
1) vertical pads the protrude slightly from the edge of the board with a magnet to hold the tiles together
2) perform all communication with IR photodiodes/leds
3) some sort of inductive coupling? (would need to be tiny, might get noisy with all those connections?)
The criteria for a good solution:
1) Cheap: as cheap as possible
2) Readily available: goes hand-in-hand with cheap I think
3) Physically reliant on PCB only: Although these tiles may eventually be cased, the interconnect shouldn't rely physically on the case in any way
4) Should not protrude from tile very much: The tiles should be connectable easily in any configuration, sliding a tile into an inside corner, dropping a tile into a hole, etc. This precludes pins and sockets.
Anyone know of anything like this that's commercially available? Perhaps some battery tabs that could be mangled to this purpose?
