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Electronics

Overview

The electronics of the Sungroper is designed to measure various physical values such as the battery voltage, tacho input, current used by the motor or provided by the solar array, temperatures, and so forth and display these values to the driver on the dash displays and to the strategist in the support vehicle.

The electronics is broken in to four distinct boards, each of which has its own eight MIPS micro processor, an Atmel AVR AT90S85335 running at 8MHz and with 512 bytes of RAM, 8k bytes of flash program memory, 32 I/O lines. The boards are described below and the linked pages include circuit diagrams, protel documents and PCB layouts.

The heart of the electronics is the Master Board which receives data from the other boards and outputs it in visual form to the driver and via wireless link to the Receiver board in the support vehicle using a pair of TRX2205A.

The soul of the electronics is the Current Sensor Board which measures the current from each of the solar array MPPTs and the current into the motor and in/out of the battery, and also an integrated total charge in/out of the battery.

The electronics in the Extra Sensor Board measures the voltage on the main battery bus and various temperatures in the car.

The electronics in the Receiver Board receive signals from the Master Board and passes them on to the portable computer in the support car which displays the values to the strategist.