2018-09-24 Meeting notes

5 min

LTC 6813

Taiping

• LTC 6813

  • Mouser claims they can get them by October, but it seems unlikely

  • Not switching because of effort and turnaround time

  • Stay with the LTC 6804 for at least 1 more revision

10 min

Communication

• When in doubt, over-communicate!

  • If you expect remote people (and people calling in) to stay updated and be able to help, make sure decisions are communicated

  • Documenting what goes on is nice, since it is asynchronous (and people don’t have to play telephone) and allows people in the future to learn what happened

  • Come into meetings with a goal of what you hope to accomplish, so we don’t waste time. Agendas (or slides) sent in advance are nice.

• No more of this “It’s a FW issue. It’s a HW issue.”

  • Work together to figure out what we can and cannot do

  • Be honest with each other

  • We’re a team, and that means that we need to work together to build a winning team, and a winning car

• Make others aware of timelines if you need to either integrate or require their support

  • They don’t know what your plans are/what dependencies you have if you don’t tell them

  • Know what the timelines are for other teams!

• If deadlines or requirements can’t be met, either we drop these requirements, or realign our priorities as a team so that we can hit them

  • Remember that lead times exist for HW, unlike writing SW where you can just deploy whenever

10 min

Track Testing

Karl

• What do we hope to accomplish at track testing?

  • (probably) obtain drag coefficient and rolling resistance

• October 6 deadline

• Tests that we need to be able to execute at the October 6 date

  • Roll-down testing

  • Cruise testing

• Roll-down testing

  • needs a solid motor controller CAN-CAN interface

  • need to be able to correlate time duration with velocity readings from motor controllers (whether that be via telemetry, driver display + camera, etc.)

• Cruise testing

  • needs a solid motor controller CAN-CAN interface

  • needs cruise control working

  • need to be able to correlate power consumption (pack voltage + current) with velocity

15 min

Aligning priorities of what to fix for MSXII

Karl + Taiping

• Things don’t just have to be assigned to one person

  • 1 person can drive the project, but again, we’re a team

  • If things are critical, work together to get it done

• Right now, focus on:

  • figuring out what is wrong with our CAN-CAN interfaces and coming up with a fix, and if we need new HW going forward

  • ensuring that track testing is not blocked and they can run the tests they need to get done

  • getting the Driver Controls rewrite done so that you can bench test once HW gets brought up

• In parallel, you can

  • get test data for BMS SOC stuff

  • validate the boards that we never brought up

• Currently BMS works. We need to unblock the other tasks.

  • Cell balancing: Not critical at the moment.

  • AUX inputs: We can run track testing without this, this is a HW fix anyways. There’s no work on FW side besides validation.

• Driver Display is only important in the sense that we could potentially use it for reading out speeds at track testing.

10 min

Additional Sensors for MS {XII, IV}

• There was talk about adding additional telemetry data, what are those things?

  • This defines FW/HW requirements and timelines

  • Does HW/FW have the bandwidth to take this on?

  • How critical are these things?

10 min

FreeRTOS

• Karl already did 90% of the work needed to bring up FreeRTOS

  • Need to validate task + thread debugging

  • Just a matter of porting over drivers now

• Concerns about not understanding our current code

30 min

Misc. stuff

• Action items for things below

• Taiping will call in and assist with charging

• We need to find missing things in the bay