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.
Impulse has six significant custom printed circuit boards.
-Battery Protection System
-Main Input Board
-Main Output Board
-Data Logger
-Telemetry Board
-Cutoff Board
Five of the six use the BRAIN, our custom micro controller package that has CAN built in. The sixth is the Data Logger, which, as you can see from an earlier blog post, uses a PIC instead.
We were able to chain together all six of these boards and run some preliminary tests. A button hooked up to the Main Input Board was able to control the turn signal on the Main Output Board. The Battery Protection System monitored fake battery packs and sent the information to the telemetry board, which wirelessly transmitted the packets to a laptop across the room. The Data logger logged every packet sent.
We could not use the Cutoff board to power everything yet because we did not have a power source capable of drawing enough current to trigger a relay.
Testing will continue during this week, and hopefully we’ll be able to move on to including the high voltage system (~100V) in our tests by Saturday. There will be some pictures in the gallery soon of our preliminary setup.