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HardwareReliabilityPower
Redundant Power Architecture for the Segment Master
By Engineering — Hardware · May 5, 2026 · 6 min read
A segment master that loses power loses a whole deck. The redundancy story has to start at the supply rail, not at the network port.
Network-level redundancy gets the marketing slide; power-level redundancy is what actually keeps the segment master online. A 24 VDC rail dropping out on a single ship bus is a more common failure than a network cut, and it takes a whole deck offline if the segment master is single-fed.
The architecture
- Dual 24 VDC inputs from independent ship buses with ORing diodes.
- A small supercapacitor bank for ride-through during ATS transients.
- Inrush limiting sized for the worst-case cold start across both inputs.
- Per-input current monitoring telemetry on the same bus as the sensor data.
What we measured in trials
~25 ms
Typical ship-bus transient during ATS event
~800 ms
Supercap ride-through with full sensor load
0
Detected deck-master outages across 18 months of pilot operation
Network redundancy makes for a good demo. Power redundancy is what keeps the demo true in service.
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