January 5, 2005 notes

 

Almost ready

 

Sorry for the lack of updates, things have been very busy lately.

 

We finally got all of our new electronics working. We had to add some inductors inline with all the motor drives to keep the current spikes from tripping the resets on the integrated driver ICs that we are using now. We aren’t very happy with this and other issues we have had with them, so we will probably use a different part on the next revision.

 

Our sensor data is much better than anything we have had before, since we shielded the cables all the way to the sensors when possible. We literally have one tenth the noise that we used to have with our older wiring and different A/D boards. The Diamond MM32 A/D board is noticeably the best out of all the different ones we have tried (WinSystems and AccessIO).

 

We still need to work out the exact protocol for the master cutoff watchdog and get all the sensors calibrated, but we should be hot-firing the vehicle engine this Saturday.