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Old 05-13-2009, 07:09 PM   #1219 (permalink)
MPaulHolmes
PaulH
 
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Maricopa, AZ (sort of. Actually outside of town)
Posts: 3,832

Michael's Electric Beetle - '71 Volkswagen Superbeetle 500000
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No connection to zeva (Hi Ian!!!).

Here's the information for futurlec:

Futurlec
2/136 Broadmeadow Rd
Broadmeadow
NSW 2292
Australia
FAX Number – Local : +61 2 94 75 4051

If you need further information, please do not hesitate to contact us.


Best Regards
Bee
Sales Assistant
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Ya, Australia came as a bit of a shock to me too! haha! Plus, I'm allergic to Bees, and I've been communicating with one over email. That's playing with fire, man...

Hey! A friend of mine had a really sneaky plan for cutting production costs on the control board. Eliminate the silkscreen, and just have the information like "R18" etched onto the board! Then I believe they tin the whole dang copper afterwards, which could then eliminate the need for the soldermask? Then it would cost like 1 penny each!
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I've been reading up on the AT90PWM3b, which is a $4 Atmel microcontroller that is specifically designed for things like AC controllers, brushless DC, synchronous rectification, Only doing A/D sampling while not switching, center aligning of who knows what, etc... Pretty much all the programming of the ATMega8 16 32 is transferable to it.

The synchronous rectification (which is straight forward-ish to implement on the AT90PWM3b) may not offer much in the way of heat savings, but it replaces a diode that can handle 50-60 amps RMS with a "diode" (mosfet) that can handle 120 amps RMS. Now the mosfet can't REALLY handle 120 amps for very long, but I bet it could do maybe 75 or 80! That would make a 750-800 amp controller with only 10 mosfets and 10 "diodes" (where the diodes are actually mosfets).
It's only in the surface mount type, though, so if we have a version that is all surface mount, that might be a fun thing to try! The one guy that I forgot the name of said his friend could help with doing the surface mount soldering with that weird machine that can do like a gazillion soldering things every second!
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TANGO CHARLIE:

INSIDE BOX DIMENSIONS: For monster motor man (ben), I'd say 7"x3"x10.5"

For Yo! (Adrian) and the phoenix fireball (joe), I'd have to say
6.5"x3"x9.5"

Maybe we could get away with 2.85" tall inside, but I don't know. The method of mounting the control board to the underside of the power section is in the air, so the height is a bit in the air. Little details here and there. Holy cow that rhymed!
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