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The finished
car will have an onboard Windows 7 computer
that will control all aspects of the engine, battery
voltages
and currents, I have decided to use Phidget USB boards
for the interface and to make programming easier I have
made a control box that will simulate all of the engines
parameters.
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Steve working merrily
on the Visual Basic program that will be the brain of
the engine. |
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Good progress on the gas turbine
management program. |
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Pictured is the 'In Dash' usb touch
screen monitor that will provide the audio & visual
indications as to the state of the GTP30 at any point.
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The start of my custom mini computer
case, 2mm aluminium is being used as the support for
the mainboard, this has the been tapped in the appropriate
places with a 6.32 thread to accept spacers that will
fix the board and PSU in to place.
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I am currently building the computer
based on a Dual-Core Mini-ITX mainboard using a 32GB
'SSD' Solid State Drive, coupled with 2GB of DDR2 RAM.
Using
a computer
is handy as all of the telemetry can be easily recorded
for future analysis. |
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How the layout of the GUI is currently looking. |
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In an attempt to try and reduce
the size and weight of components, I am going to utilise
this
Via Epia PX10000 mainboard, as you can see it is very small,
the power supply and hard drive have yet to be added
to the computers case increasing it's volume.
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Pico mainboard, psu and drive all
fitted in a quite a small box, not a lot of room left,
but there again it's
not needed, so far so good, this will be easy to fit
in to a hidden place in the car.
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Finished box with an added air vent
that allows the processor fan to make use of cool air.
Now the bad part, the mainboard doesn't properly support
windows 7-32 bit, which is a problem as the software has
actually been written for the windows 7 platform, time to
make yet another computer.
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Computer version 3, back to the
Mini-ITX mainboard which is a very tight fit in to a
17x17cm alloy case. The PSU and SSD have been mounted
on to the case lid and a fan added to extract any warm
air.
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So far I have carried out quite
a few hours of testing with this particular computer
and it has proved to be very stable and work extremely well,
there was a point where I thought I was going to have
to use conventional
aircraft
gauges and bin the glass cockpit, my faith is now restored.
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I am now going
to make use of a built in 7" wide screen monitor rather
than one that pops in and out as the my original screen
has now failed.
For the drive power consumption we are toying with using
level meters rather than gauges, this seems to work best
with
peripheral vision. |
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Our very scientific testing and
development bench.
This now pretty much concludes the software and hardware
phase of the project, its now down to Ian to manufacture
some clever electronics that will convert RPM and EGT
etc to 0 to 5 volts so that the Phidget boards can operate
correctly. |
MGF
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