

Teardown reveals Chevy Volt's electronic secrets - nherbw
http://edn.com/design/automotive/4372600/Teardown-reveals-Chevy-Volt-s-electronic-secrets

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jroll
I used to work at the hybrid battery lab at GM, and for a while on the Volt
battery itself. I'm happy to try to answer any questions (without breaking
confidentiality, of course).

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yardie
Are the boards end user programmable or readable? One of the things that
fascinated me about the Nissan Skyline GT and cars with OBDII was the ability
to plugin a laptop and get realtime data from the ECU, program the valve
timings, and in the case of the Skyline get the brake, Antislip, and g-forces
data. Is this type of information available to the owners?

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jroll
That's a good question. Everything eventually connects in to the ECU, so
there's no reason the customer shouldn't be able to read this data. As for
writing data, I'm not sure how difficult it would be, but it can probably be
done.

Personally, I'd leave battery controls to people smarter than me. Consider
that the battery costs around $8,000, and that severe over- or under-charging
is a massive hazard to both the battery's lifespan and the driver's life.

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mey
Can anyone explain why there are so many control boards? It seems like a
nightmare wiring those systems together and coding them all to correctly
interact together.

Then again I have limited experience with real-time systems.

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sliverstorm
I'm going to guess "modularity". Probably also cheaper to shoehorn more
smaller boards into the car, than one large board.

Anyway, as for connecting them and coding the interfaces, they've been doing
that for ages. Have you heard of CAN bus? It's actually pretty cool.

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mey
That's pretty interesting, thanks for sharing. Hadn't heard of CAN before.

