We’re proud to welcome NXP as a new sponsor! The brains of a solar car are essential. For our designs, we use a distributed network of a handful of microcontrollers. Each node in our network controls something different, such as managing the batteries, controlling the motor, or taking all the input from the driver. An …
Hello everybody! For the second year in a row, we’re at Maker Faire. This weekend event is always fun, and we meet tons of neat people with cool stories. It’s already the second day of Maker Faire, and it has been a blast. Whether it’s reconnecting with members of solar car teams from a decade …
On Monday, we got a very generous donation from KIT Digital. After KIT Digital’s purchase of Sezmi, the company went through some internal changes and ended up with a fairly sizable collection of unneeded electrical equipment. They got in contact with us, and arranged to donate all of this equipment to CalSol. This donation will …
Last week, we were working on improving our Battery Monitoring System, and ran into a few problems. High voltage went a few places that it wasn’t supposed to, and we were left with several boards in less-than-perfect working condition. The damaged boards were manufactured by Linear Technology, and were used to individually monitor each battery …
This Saturday, for the first time, we tried connecting all of our low voltage boards together. We didn’t have a high voltage power source, so we powered everything off of 12V wall sockets. Our new battery packs should be ready soon. We successfully established CAN (Controller Area Network) communication between several of the boards.
We are proud to announce Linear Technology as a Gold Sponsor of CalSol. Linear Technology are the designers and makers of the boards we are using to monitor our Li-Ion batteries. These boards are essential to both ensuring the safety of the driver and giving us real-time detailed feedback on the state of our batteries. …
Laser cutters are awesome! I got the chance to use one this weekend in making our box for the PCBs. It’s all made out of clear acrylic, so it’s kind of hard to see, but it looks really neat in person. All the holes for the ventilation and mounting are cut, and there’s some cool …
Last Sunday, we had a very successful CAN (Controller Area Network) trial. We were able to simultaneously transmit and receive CAN message packets between three of our BRAINS and the Tritium motor controller. We tried two setups. one where the Tritium sent messages and all three BRAINS flashed lights to indicate receiving the message, and …
