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Hypercube 100A H-bridge
 The rational behind a Synthetic AI Hand Project is straight forward. The entire human race civilization is built by a pair of hands duplicated over and over again doing the little things that collectively becomes civilization. So if we could make a pair of really good AI infused synthetic hands, only one pair of hands would ever get built, and the rest are all just duplicates. Project details: Synthetic AI Hand Project |
KiCAD based Linux ARM SoC boards are now under development. These boards are open sourced with more to come in the future. The boards here are support boards for Hypercube projects. This particular board is a 100A H-bridge under design. Soon to be open sourced after testing :) Design work is finished, awaiting manufacturing and testing.  Uses - This board useful for making high end 3D printers with big motors - With modern fast ARM CPUs, it can be used in phase shifted bridge operating mode for highest efficiency - Drive MPDWE (a motor that has no axle for heavy lift drones) - Control high power drone motors for heavy lift and drone delivery - Make 3D metal printer - Can be paralleled up to drive car motors and electric vehicles and develop the drive train more quickly. The inputs to the H-Bridge are simple 3.3V and can be driven by 3.3V Arduino boards and ARM SoC boards. - One board in total can handle 200A at 25V i.e. about 5kW. 12 boards in one fully formed Hypercube can handle 60kW. 60kW more than good enough for make electric bikes, and electric cars. - 10 fully populated Hypercubes of 100A Dual H-Bridge boards can potentially drive a lorry, bus, coach etc with 700kW motor - One fully populated Hypercube is enough to drive the most powerful humanoid sized 3D printed walking robots. (Something we hope to be making soon.) - H-Bridge max voltage is 30V - which is ideal for 24V battery systems - The GND is common between the motor supply for safety. - The drive circuit is optically isolated to prevent high dV/dt and dI/dt signals reaching the 3.3V CPU - However the CPU should be protected with metal grounded shielding otherwise extremely powerful EMP signals will reach the CPU and knock it out when switching around 5kW of energy. - The input lines are held low by pull down resistors. - Sending a 3.3V high signal will turn on the appropriate H-bridge MOSFETs - The design is arranged as 4 half H-bridges. This allows the half bridges to be paralleled to make extremely high current H-bridge. - The half bridges are wired manually to make full bridges. The contact rating of the screw terminal is 20A. If more current needed, the solder pads to the connectors have been made large allowing bigger wires to be soldered directly to the board. The wires can be soldered direct to the leads of the MOSFETs - but take care, as it definitely invalidates any warranty as well as damage a lot of things if 100A circuit is mis-wired. Cooling & Safety The MOSFETs are 2mR. At 100A, you can expect it to consume about 0.2W. But this is only true if the MOSFET is cool and the MOSFET is not being switched on and off at high speed. As the temperature rises to around 100 degrees, the resistance will increase to about 4mR and so the device will absorb around 0.4W. As the switching frequency increases, there is a finite amount of time when the MOSFET is going from 2mR to near infinite off resistance. During this brief switching period, it will absorb a lot of power. The faster the switching frequency, the more energy that gets absorbed by the MOSFET. Typical switching frequency before MOSFET efficiency becomes a problem is 100kHz upwards. They can be driven up to 10MHz with good cooling. But be careful, if the system is radiating energy because of improperly wired coils, and the total energy in the radiation is running into a couple of of watts to kilowatts, then this radiated energy is dangerous and life threatening, as well as damaging to any electronic items in its vicinity including biomedical devices such as pacemakers. If you are cranking up the power, be sure to know your electronics, and if uncertain get help from a suitably qualified electronics engineer. When driving high current motors and coils, imagine what might happen if the load is suddenly removed. There is nowhere for the currents and voltages to go, and so it is all returned back to the H-bridge! There are flywheel diodes built into the MOSFETs to handle this energy surge, but the bigger the currents and voltages, the bigger the surge. The surge is returned to the power supply by the flywheel diodes. For a short instant a 25V power supply can surge to thousands of volts. Usually that never matters because there will always be another coil that the surge power will get dumped into. But if all of those coils are simultaneously seeing the load lightening, then the power is returned to the battery. Usually the battery or the power source can handle this returned power. Despite this being a requirement, high wattage power supplies are not always designed to handle this kind of surge power being returned to it. So be careful - know your power supply when driving high wattage loads. And if the power source is a battery, it most definitely will not handle large amounts of returned power. It takes a long time (about 4 to 20 minutes) for a battery to go from discharging mode to re-charging mode because it is a chemistry change. So it will not accept the returned power, and thus the returning energy pulse builds up in the wires generating thousands of volts ready to arc across electronics, batteries and terminals. To avoid this, you can fit a supercapacitor to absorb the returning energy pulse. Many electric vehicles have it. They are big capacitors with instant reaction able to absorb a lot of power. Again take care if using supercapacitors when large amounts of energy is involved. A third of the energy in the pulse is lost as heat - this is down to basic physics of capacitors. This lost energy is heating up the supercapacitor! So if regular amounts of pulse energy is being mitigated by supercapacitors, then be sure to fit cooling for them. Fitting supercapacitors in general not a good idea - better to have some other method to mitigate damaging pulse energy - for example fitting some kind of sensor that directs pulse energy to a rectifier circuit, rectifies it, and use it to charge another set of batteries. These advisories do not provide full coverage about safety. You need to know your electronics and rely on your expertise to guide you to safe usage of high power electronics when designing products such as electric vehicles, high power drone motors, large 3D printers and so on. |
 Hypercube PCBs come with their own interchangeable software to mix and match functions as needed. Designed around IoT needs, we make prototyping work fast and effortless. |
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