Raspberry pi Zero Triple SD and Audio board

This is a public release of this design, created in KiCad. This board will plug on top of a Pi Zero and provide 3 SD cards (1x SDIO, 2x SPI) and an audio output DAC with headphone driver. This was originally designed for a prototype Audio player / streaming setup. This is a cutdown version omitting some power and misc components that are no longer required. The board could be re-routed to be smaller, however I feel releasing the tested version is a better idea....

May 20, 2017 · 1 min · Ben V. Brown

AFE for BMS Design 2

AFE for BMS Design 2 - Schematic Capture In part one of this series I looked at the inital concept of what an AFE is and a basic outline. In the previous post I presented the follow ideas for the design of the system : 9-15S LiPo battery (BQ76940) 100mA balance current 40A continuous duty current shunt, 50A peak PCB area less than 10x10cm panel LED SOC indication Ability to communicate to an external display to show detailed information Temperature sensing inside the battery pack Track the health of the pack Looking at this design, I selected to use a companion controller to work with the AFE for the inital design of this BMS....

March 10, 2017 · 2 min · Ben V. Brown

AFE for BMS Design 1

Getting Started with AFE’s for BMS design. Analog Front End IC’s are becoming more popular from major IC manufacturers. These chips are designed to wrap all the analogue circuitry required for the design and operation of a BMS system up into a small package. Reducing design and programming time for the designer(s). This forfill a useful segment of the market where the application may want different design parameters to a normal BMS design, or even just for learning the operation modes of a BMS....

March 8, 2017 · 7 min · Ben V. Brown

Tivaware on GCC (GNU)

Setting up Tivaware with GCC under CCS6 For a upcoming project I have designed in a TI TM4C123GH6PM, which is part of the Tiva lineup of ARM core processors. Naturally i would prefer to develop with the GCC compiler toolchain rather than the TI compiler, so this is a rough guide with notes for how i converted the given USB Device example code to use the GCC compiler instead. Compiler settings First, as normal, import the example project into CCS and build and test to ensure it works on the TI compiler first....

June 9, 2016 · 2 min · Ben V. Brown