This is a new board on FS-4. It’s purpose is to read from the CAN bus and record that data, as well as transmit it over a wireless connection to a base station, which can then relay it to a database hosted on the internet for live viewing by the whole team.
Unlike previous years, the logging telemetry board will not have a microcontroller and will instead be a “hat” which sits upon any SBC with the standard 40 pin header, which must have I2S, I2C, UART0, and SPI0,1 matching the raspberry pi spec. This decision was made because:
- It is difficult to write lots of data to an SD card from a MCU The software needed for TCP/IP communication and to interface with either the Teledatics or Heltec (or seeed) module only really exists as a linux module…
- Writing such a big driver is a lot of work
- Logging using the linux can-utils package has already been tested at norcal, and works well
The board will have the following features:
- 3 can peripherals capable of up to 12 Mbps
- Audio codec to run driver audio comms
- Robust automotive 12v power input
- Alternate M.2-E and PCIe 802.11ah HaLow card support
- RTC
Current work
See this subfolder, and it’s readme, and it’s schematic pdf When PCB’s are ordered, a static version of relevant documents will be placed here.
A working prototype
- It has no radio hardware
- It has a raspberry pi pico with usb←>uart firmware
- It has an MCP2515 CAN board, from my car, which I modified to work with 3.3v logic
- It has connectors to go inline between the main harness and a peripheral board
A “vibes” first try schematic
Issues:
- I made this schematic in kicad nightly, so it needed to be redone
- It cannot be collaborated on well, because it does not take advantage of hierarchical sheets
- There’s no architectural support for an alternative module