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Motor controllers: Routes and controls power to vehicle motors (sources current into battery pack during regenerative braking), by receiving commands from the driver controls board.
Maximum power point tracking (MPPT): Power converter that transforms PV array voltage to a constant value, while adjusting the current draw from the array to maximize total power output available to the car.
Our electrical system also has a non-critical ECU for telemetry, which is equipped with a radio transmitter to broadcast vehicle diagnostic information to a team member in a chase vehicle during a race.
All ECU boards except for the motor controllers are controllers and MPPT boards are designed and manufactured by the electrical team, which also contains a large software group dedicated to writing the embedded firmware for all ECUs. Midnight Sun has a relationship with a high-quality PCB fab located in Markham, but also uses various other fabs with faster lead time. All soldering is done by team members, which requires good training to ensure reliable solder joints are made consistently on our boards (debugging hardware manufacturing problems later takes far longer than getting it right the first time).
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