New Project

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hotspoons
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New Project

Post by hotspoons »

Good evening,

I am in the process of determining feasibility of a potential project that is based on a mid-engined chassis. To do it practically, I will need to sell my Lotus so my wife doesn't divorce me, and I will have a place to do said project. This will probably happen later this year.

That said, I am trying to learn as much as I can without having my hands on hardware. I am a software engineer/team lead by trade, though my experience is generally non-scientific (e.g. earning summations, sanitized PII, in Java and .NET core); however I am always interested in experimenting and learning.

I have already absorbed an immense amount of information by going down a rabbit hole on this forum for 8 hours today and reading through and watching all relevant attached media.

I am pretty close on an initial feasibility study of my proposed project (all things point to yes) but I need to get confirmation on a couple of dimensions as I am relying on what I believe to be a fairly accurate rendering from a racing simulator as my mock-up, and if I am more than an inch off in one of my guesses, the whole thing wont work.

Anyhow, hello and expect to hear more from me soon!
MattsAwesomeStuff
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Re: New Project

Post by MattsAwesomeStuff »

Sounds exciting, keep us posted, hide the Lotus.

If you're interested in giving back to the community, I know there's always a need for experienced software development on the VCU projects. It frees up some of the contributors to put efforts into other places.
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mdrobnak
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Re: New Project

Post by mdrobnak »

Welcome!
Yes, having an experienced software dev is definitely useful, although the VCU project is in C/C++. 99% of it is pretty straightforward though in terms of code as we have libraries which abstract most of the hard pieces.
There's tons of interesting info here. Where'd you find the forum?

-Matt
hotspoons
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Re: New Project

Post by hotspoons »

MattsAwesomeStuff wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 8:01 am Sounds exciting, keep us posted, hide the Lotus.

If you're interested in giving back to the community, I know there's always a need for experienced software development on the VCU projects. It frees up some of the contributors to put efforts into other places.
Thanks! I will have a look and see where I might be able to contribute.

mdrobnak wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:31 pm Welcome!
Yes, having an experienced software dev is definitely useful, although the VCU project is in C/C++. 99% of it is pretty straightforward though in terms of code as we have libraries which abstract most of the hard pieces.
There's tons of interesting info here. Where'd you find the forum?

-Matt
Thanks! I haven't really touched C/C++ for 10 or 11 years, but I'm sure I could pick it back up. Maybe I can try my hand at rust too 🙂 - the tooling around rust is awesome, though the memory management/borrowing concepts are headache inducing.

I'll setup the VCU project in Eclipse tonight and acclamate myself with what's what. I built a robotics kit for a raspberry pi last summer and wrote my own control software for it (in python), and had a ton of fun doing it, so maybe I'll find somewhere I can contribute here. One thought I has was parameterized traction control based on acceleration from the encoder signal, without requiring reference speeds from wheel sensors (e.g. the motor spun from 2000 to 6000 RPMs over a quarter of a second, so we probably lost traction or are laying down 1 tire fire; cut throttle until previously known good RPM is achieved again).

I'm not really well versed with electrical engineering, but understand enough to be able to follow along with what's discussed here for the most part. Many moons ago I built a couple of megasquirts from a BOM and bare PCB, so replacing logic boards and doing some basic wiring doesn't really scare me off.

Besides the Lotus, I also have a long range single motor Tesla model 3 as my family car; the EV experience is really so much better that I eventually came to the conclusion that any future project I was going to do was going to be an EV.

How did I happen upon this forum? Well, I checked out diylectriccar.com about a month ago, and it seemed to be relatively sparse for engagement, with everyone complaining about the forum owners (looks to be the same folks that took over lotustalk) and admins not being able to to anything. I waited 3 weeks before the admins released my account from purgatory so I could actually post. Lots of links came over to this forum, which seemed to be much more technical. It reminds me of the dichotomy between rennlist and pelican parts forums 20 years ago.

This stuff really seems like the hotrodding of the future, I am surprised that the communities aren't bigger by now.
hotspoons
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Re: New Project

Post by hotspoons »

I presume that you are referring to the stm32-sine repository on GitHub when referring to the VCU project. I couldn't get the project to load properly in Eclipse, the macro preprocessors are wigging out the semantics engine in Eclipse. I was able to get it to load in VSCode with one weird issue, but that doesn't affect building the project.

I started poking around the source code and project structure. I'm glad the maintainer is using git modules with forks for the external dependency, looks to be pretty well put together for a C/C++ project. I made it half way through the hw_init class before my wife called for me, everything looks relatively straight forward. I was pleased to see that there seems to be a pretty solid abstraction between the microcontroller code in the library and the business logic code in the main project, it will help with somebody like me to be able to effectively contribute. I will probably start a thread over in the software section with more questions and observations.
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mdrobnak
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Re: New Project

Post by mdrobnak »

hotspoons wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 9:53 pm
MattsAwesomeStuff wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 8:01 am Sounds exciting, keep us posted, hide the Lotus.

If you're interested in giving back to the community, I know there's always a need for experienced software development on the VCU projects. It frees up some of the contributors to put efforts into other places.
Thanks! I will have a look and see where I might be able to contribute.

mdrobnak wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:31 pm Welcome!
Yes, having an experienced software dev is definitely useful, although the VCU project is in C/C++. 99% of it is pretty straightforward though in terms of code as we have libraries which abstract most of the hard pieces.
There's tons of interesting info here. Where'd you find the forum?

-Matt
Thanks! I haven't really touched C/C++ for 10 or 11 years, but I'm sure I could pick it back up. Maybe I can try my hand at rust too 🙂 - the tooling around rust is awesome, though the memory management/borrowing concepts are headache inducing.

I'll setup the VCU project in Eclipse tonight and acclamate myself with what's what.

I'm not really well versed with electrical engineering, but understand enough to be able to follow along with what's discussed here for the most part. Many moons ago I built a couple of megasquirts from a BOM and bare PCB, so replacing logic boards and doing some basic wiring doesn't really scare me off.

Besides the Lotus, I also have a long range single motor Tesla model 3 as my family car; the EV experience is really so much better that I eventually came to the conclusion that any future project I was going to do was going to be an EV.

How did I happen upon this forum? Well, I checked out diylectriccar.com about a month ago, and it seemed to be relatively sparse for engagement, with everyone complaining about the forum owners (looks to be the same folks that took over lotustalk) and admins not being able to to anything.

This stuff really seems like the hotrodding of the future, I am surprised that the communities aren't bigger by now.
Awesome. You'll do fine. I'm "OK" at development, and I'm helping reorganize stuff regularly. ;)

CodeBlocks is what all of johu's projects and their descendants are set up for. Being on Ubuntu I'm just using straight up 'make'.

If you can build and understand Megaquirt, you'll be fine for the hardware side mostly. It's just higher voltages and more 'crank shaft' signals.

Model 3 is a good choice, I have a 2018 Model 3 Performance. Love it. Have a 2015 Model S 85 on loaner while my car is in the shop for an obscure BMS error. Car reminds me of a Lincoln Town Car. But faster, even locked in Chill. :D

Nice to see you found stuff referring you here from DIYElectriCar.

The lack of understanding of:
* Electrical wiring
* Physics
* Computer Software

is what keeps most away. For noncommerical products, the polish isn't there yet.

As far as Rust goes, the stm32-rs HAL projects can use some help, but then you are getting into the weeds. Rust on embdedded works great - if the IO you're trying to use has a driver for it. I had to help with the RTC and CAN drivers. (I cleaned up someone elses work for RTC and fixed a bunch of errors, and for CAN I helped test implementations). The charge port controller code is mostly-closed source for now. However, the IVT-S shunt code is open, and if you want to contribute to that, that's awesome.

Relevant links: VCU - https://github.com/damienmaguire/Stm32-vcu
ISA Rust lib - https://github.com/mdrobnak/isa-ivt-shunt-rs

Again, welcome!

-Matt
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Jack Bauer
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Re: New Project

Post by Jack Bauer »

Much appreciate the help:)
I'm going to need a hacksaw
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qmedia2651
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Re: New Project

Post by qmedia2651 »

Keep it up don't give up you can do it 💪
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