Isn’t debug fun? It sure separates the boys from the men, or me from my sanity Wink
I’ll be on vacation starting Monday. That excuse one for not having my BMS installed. #2 is that the second truck has taken all of my time to get corrections made to it’s various electrical systems. It’s basically done. Just needs a new pack. So the #1 truck is the tough vehicle to get a shielded cable from the pack to the interior of the truck. Once the cable is mounted through the wall of the pack, then adding the BMS is easy. Now I have Thundersky’s that I have been testing as well as 3 new 50ah Hi Power cells to test.
To look for noise it’s helpful to determine if it’s conducted or radiated noise. Steps that I use.
Conducted Emissions
1) I like to use clip on ferrite beads for initial debug. Easier and faster than adding components. The kind you see attached to a wall wart power supply or your pc monitor cable. 25-30mm long. 15-20mm in diameter. When picking them up from surplus locations, get a few different versions as you don’t know which RF material they are made from. Clip them onto both ends of the master bus cable. One at the master board and one at the first slave. Check for changes. Does the system work better? Verify with a scope, always.
2) Now repeat step one with the Slave bus, with all of the master bus ferrites removed. The slave bus could easily carry EMI/RFI and cause issues.
3) Repeat step one with ferrites on Master and Slave bus.
4) The shotgun approach is to just do both Master and Slave bus at the same time. But you won’t know the sources of noise as well.
If 1-4 improve function then it’s the noise is mostly conducted emissions. Although radiated emissions from the vehicle could turn into conducted emissions due to the huge amount of wiring we have to use.
5) Always twist pairs of cables to 4 turns per 25.4mm(1 inch) between slaves. Cordless drill works great for twisting wires together.
6) Use shielded cables with twisted pairs for Master to first slave cables.
Radiated Emissions
Here is a fantastic article on how to make a home made probe for sniffing EMI/RFI with your scope from a piece of coax a tiny ferrite bead, and some sandpaper. When I showed the crew at work this article, everyone had me making these probes for them.
http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?AD=1&AD=1&ArticleID=7491&pg=1
Here is the probe I made from the article.
Below are scope shots using my probe on a project that has so much EMI that it smoked the processor and other drivers badly enough that my head with a full face helmet, hit the ground hard and made me unconscious. Had a concussion for a year. So EMI and I have become great friends!
There are EMI and RFI (aka E field) probes. An E field probe is just the ground of your scope probe tied to the probe tip. It shorts it in a dc sense. But for RFI, it’s a path to joy and harmony. If you make your probe ground lead a bit longer and coil it, the probe becomes much more sensitive to weak signals.
Both EMI and RFI probing examples of my concussion making machine (a home made self balancing scooter) are shown here.
These scope shots showed me clearly at the time where the emissions were coming from. Each output from the processor got a 1k resistor to isolate it from the drivers. A 1k resistor was put on the output of the driver chips. These two steps did not reduce EMI, but did reduce it from getting into the sensitive parts. The next step was to reduce the EMI itself. I had used 250mm long ribbon cables for connecting the master board to two slaves (control board to 2 H-bridge boards). Normally the ribbon cables are about 50mm long. Reinstalling the 50mm cables did the trick. The EMI probe showed me the way. As you can see from the scope shots I also found EMI from the power supply inductor as well that I could follow with my handy EMI probe along a ground trace. That’s right. EMI was following the ground!!
So assume nothing, and measure everything!!
