Work Log 1
Find two electric skateboards and pull info on them to determine a baseline.
Focused features were battery, motors, speed, and range.
Work Log 2
Detail the design for the control slice.
My portion was to determine possible communication protocols.
Choices were narrowed down to I2C and CAN for the low number of wires used and the ability to have multiple masters in the system.
I2C is more integrated and natively supported in the Arduino family. CAN is very robust yet isn’t natively supported. Use of CAN may be cost prohibitive.
Work Log 3
My particular project is the control slice of the overall board. Lots of changes has occurred this past week. Previously the control slice was going to be the “middleman” for most of the operations as it would take in speed inputs from the user and output those to the drive slice. However, the overall project saw a change in execution to achieve our goal. The project is going to use more off the shelf components than originally planned. This will help realize our goal of making this easy for others to replicate the design. In the previous week we worked on what microcontroller would be used and what communication protocol we would utilize. With our new plan for the slice the microcontroller may become obsolete, we may need to switch to something like a raspberry pi to run the software needed. For this coming week we are working on figuring out how to switch the slice over to the new plan of telemetry gathering/reporting and battery monitoring. We found an open-source software called VESC that looks like it will do exactly what we are after, so a major goal is to become familiar with this software and its implementation. We also need to get a full list of parts we need ordered. We will also need to get with the battery slice to see what things we need covered that the batteries BMS doesn’t cover. Some concerns I have for the week is how this new project redefinition will affect the previous goals for the control slice and how those will change.