Additional Hardware
In addition to the Arduino further hardware is needed for the carduinodroid. The additional hardware is used e.g. in order to control the engines and lights of the car or for monitoring the charge of the battery. Furthermore a smartphone mount was developed that allows the proper attachment of the smartphone onto the car.
The boards of the additional hardware were designed using CadSoft EAGLE. You can find the newest version of the software here: Eagle download-page. Moreover you can find an Eagle tutorial here: Eagle-tutorial.
You can have the boards produced by a PCB-manufacturer (e.g. PCB-Pool ). Which information they need depends on the manufacturer but in either case you will need the .brd-file.
These are the files you need:
- Motorsteuerung.brd carduinodroid-hardware: Motorsteuerung (Repository)
- Lichtplatine.brd carduinodroid-hardware: Lichtplatine (Repository)
- LEDs.brd carduinodroid-hardware: LEDs (Repository)
- BatteryManagement.brd carduinodroid-hardware: BatteryManagement (Repository)
Instead you can create the boards yourself based on the circuit diagrams.
The motor-board is based on the motordriver-IC L298N by STMicroelectronics. In order to discharge the no-load currents 4 Schottky-diodes are used. The motor-board allows to provide the engine with up to 3 ampere.
In order to determine the remaining capacity of the battery the battery-board was developed based on the DS2745. Performing a voltage measurement using a high precision measuring resistor the current power consumption is quantified. Based on this value the remaining capacity of the battery can be approximated. The results are transmitted to the Arduino via I2C.
[>> carduinodroid-hardware: BatteryManagement (Repository)](https://github.com/tuiSSE/carduinodroid-hardware/tree/master/Battery_Management)