Donald-Lau_Spartan Superway

The team is still looking for a proper charger and making sure it works fine with the Orion Jr. BMS. A Elcon 1.8kW charger is considered but the team is still trying to reach out a distributor. Finalized the supercapacitors holder and have the copper busbars connected in the CAD design.

A DC DC converter and a charger are needed to be integrated into the BMS system. The supercapacitors' voltage drops over the discharging time but the motor controller would need a constant power input. A DC DC converter can stabilize the power output to operate the motor controller. The charger the team is looking at would need to support CANbus communication, a widely used communication between controllers and charger in EV field. No charger has been decided though.

The team is looking into the datasheet, manual, and wiring diagram on the Orion Jr. BMS. The team also was working on the holders for supercapacitors and has a prototype SolidWorks drawing completed.

After talking to Eric Wertz, the team was told to consider a over-from-shelf battery management system (BMS). The team is looking at the Orion Jr. BMS at this moment and most likely going to discard the current design.

It's presentation week. The team was preparing the presentation hence there's not much add to the current design.  The team decided to use an active balancing method to prevent supercapacitors' overcharging and undercharging at the same pack.

The team was looking into the Atting 841 and the needed communication protocol for the capacitors bank. The team also started to create a simple flowchart and a program draft for the slave attiny 841. Attiny 841 running code /* assume parallel Vcc to an analog pin; Rx, Tx are binary numbers PIN_A1, output binary as voltage # PIN_A2, input as address */ #include <avr/sleep.h> #include <EEPROM.h> int addr = 0; byte val; byte target = 0; int read_state = 0; int voltage = 0; const byte interruptPin = PIN_B0; // pin used for waking up const byte receivingPin = PIN_A2; // Rx in 841 const byte transmittingPin = PIN_A1; // Tx in 841 const byte voltagePin = PIN_B1; // pin used to read voltage void setup() {     pinMode(receivingPin, INPUT);     pinMode(interruptPin, INPUT);     pinMode(transmittingPin, OUTPUT);     pinMode(voltagePin, INPUT); }     int wakeUpNo...

Final all the groups have put the things back together. The team came out with Attiny 841 to communicate with the slave controllers and main Arduino. Serial communication is considered to be the communication method for the capacitors bank and the microcontroller.