Skillset & Portfolio > ARMing All The Things (2014)
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Brains
My first encounter with Ecoult in mid-2014 was to co-design the ‘main brain’ of the UltraBattery monitoring system, based on the ARM-based Freescale Kinetis K60 microcontroller.
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On-Battery Monitoring
Each 12V monoblock has its own monitoring system (inc MCU), linked to the comms hierarchy via IR. We made substantial refinements to this subsystem in 2015.
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Got Energy?
From a single 12V monoblock (think: truck battery), to a 480-monoblock 960 Volt 800kWH monster like this, monitoring rechargeable batteries is critical to keeping them within safe limits and maximising service life.
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Peripheral Concerns
This PCB featured Ethernet with PoE, USB, MicroSD card, 3 x RS485 interfaces (1 isolated), coin-cell RTC backup, and various other application-specific i/o. It’s not exactly a pretty layout, a classic example of the environment dictating its form.
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Routing & Isolation
Sometimes decisions get made about where things are placed in your product that you wish you could go back and change when it comes time to route the PCB - but you can’t, an army of other wheels are in motion that can’t be stopped, so you just suck it up and work hard to get everything to fit. Incredibly this PCB fit onto a 4-layer PCB.
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Controlled impedance length-matched routing
Signal Integrity is important, so keeping certain high-speed signals at a known impedance and, for differential pairs, at the same length, is critical to a reliable design.