This page is for documenting things that are cool but are reserved for the future.

Distributed Topology

It would be neat if we had a board on each module that could report its voltage, temperature, and SOC. If we wanted to, we could also support passive balancing.

This idea originally started off with the goal of SOC history-based balancing, where my idea was to put a fuel gauge on each module. Since it seems like we're going to need a connector per module for voltage sense and thermistors, we might as well build a board, and if we're doing that, we might as well put some chips on it. In that case, it makes sense to read the voltage and temperature from the fuel gauge as well, so we don't need the AFEs anymore. Then, to ensure that we don't have signal integrity issues, we could use CAN to communicate between the boards, so we'd have a controller on each board running some simple firmware to read data from the fuel gauge and respond to a master controller that would actually interface with the main system bus.

So it's a distributed topology that has a CAN interface which collates the cell data and responds to questions from the system CAN bus.