Month: August 2015

Serious MOSFETs

Posted in Electronics, Making, Robotics - August 27, 2015 - 0 Comment

2015-08-26 23.44.43

I’m designing a simple H-bridge for simple but large projects. These are 300A 40V MOSFETS. The board also has a driver for the MOSFETs. I hope to find a driver that uses I2C or some other interface, rather than PWM.

2015-10-12 22.13.25

The board overall is pretty small, but I haven’t figured out a good way to heat sink it. The unpopulated round footprints are for capacitors, and when the caps are installed, they block any easy installation of a heat sink over the MOSFETs. I may design the second iteration of the board around thermal management, and have holes for mounting a commodity CPU heat sink over the FETs.

The current design of the board is available here.

I’ve tested a prototype of the current design, and it does work, but I didn’t stress it very hard.

2015-09-13 17.07.01

ToyBrain Rides Again

Posted in Uncategorized - August 26, 2015 - 0 Comment

Now with WiFi, current monitoring, and the ever-worrying li-poly battery chemistry.

image

I haven’t tested the WiFi module or motor drivers yet, but the board is fully populated and the battery regulation circuit works.

There are a few design changes in the pipeline, but I’m going to go for a full hardware test and try to find more bugs before I create version 2 of the boards.

The current design is in github, along with all the docs.