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| January 25, 2005 Welcome Back! Senior Design II is here, and with full force! We have a long list of design modifications to make to our project this semester. Senior Design I was a great success, but also left us with a lot of room for improvement. Look for more batteries to be added to our prototype, a completely rewritten charging algorithm, new charge-equalization circuits, and much more! One thing that won't change, however, is Heath's contribution lifting heavy stuff. |
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November 29, 2004 We're Done! (for now) That's right... after a very long semester full of paperwork, coffee, long hours at Simrall, and more paperwork, Design I has come to a close. We proudly present to you (do do DO!)... Our Working System! This is a snapshot of our prototype in action. Those yellow sticks on the bottom are our batteries. 12 Volts each, this prototype outputs ~48 Volts. Each of the breadboards above in the "rack" are a Slave Microcontroller and monitoring sensors. Each is dedicated to a single battery. Behind all the slaves (not visible in the picture) is our Master Microcontroller who is running the show. The Master decides when each battery needs to be charged and discharged. Visible on the laptop screen is Heath's Diagnostic software. It monitors, in real time, the status and activity of the entire charging system. It also lets us power the system on or off, and manually switch the batteries from charging to discharging mode. It's the best Senior Design project ever! |
| October 10, 2004 **Design Change** Originally, we had planned to use simple PLDs as an interface between the battery monitor circuits and the microcontroller. We planned to use hardware to read the voltage and temperature and report to the PLD. Why were we not using some type of A/D to convert the temperature and voltage to a digital signal? Most current battery-charging systems don't monitor the actual voltage value, but instead watch certain voltage and temperature thresholds. They assume that small differences in voltage or temperature aren't indicative of anything, and that processing that data is just a waste of time. We based our design on this assumption at first. However, as we looked closer, we decided that these small differences might be helpful for more complicated predictions. We might be able to predict problems quicker than other systems if we watch these small variances. Furthermore, PLD's make upgrades difficult. Therefore, we've decided to use a PIC (PIC18F242) instead of a PLD. These PICS are a bit more expensive, but they include a 5-channel, 10-bit A/D which we can use to monitor the battery characteristics with more precision. They're also easier to manage and upgrade. We believe that this feature will place our system another step higher than systems on the market today. |
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September 26, 2004 New animation added. This animation illustrates the concept of our charging circuit. Click the link to the left to learn more. |
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September 20, 2004 We've added a new section to our website: Animations. This page will consist of a collection of concept animations of our project. It's pretty bare right now, but soon you'll be able to take a virtual tour of our finished product. The videos will eventually be available in both .mpg and .wmv formats. By the way, that's a battery to the right. |
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September 20, 2004 Electric Vehicles have been around for a long, LONG, time. Believe it or not, ads for electric vehicles began showing up as early as 1909 (like the one in the image to the left). The link to the left will take you to Dr. Jerry Bruce's website where you'll find a small collection of electric vehicle ads from the early 1900's. The ads are courtesy of Dr. Micheal Schiffer of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. I'm sure that back then, people thought that everyone would be driving an electric vehicle by the 1920's or 1930's. They probably thought that by the 1970's, we'd all have flying cars. Unfortunately, the electric vehicle thing still hasn't made it big. Why? The thought of stopping every 90 miles or so and spending 30-45 minutes at a charging station doesn't appeal to many people. Hopefully, HEV's will succeed where electric vehicles have failed. Our battery charging system will pave the way for a new generation of HEVs... Well, maybe. |
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August 30, 2004 Welcome to our website! Our project is to build a battery charging system for the Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) that will be built for Challenge X, a GM-sponsored contest between twelve universities across the UnitEd States. The common goal is to convert a GM Equinox into an HEV. For more information, click the image to the right. |
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