All that effort to build a connected charging station brought its first victory as we were finally able to regulate charging based on the solar energy available. Since we had issues with our solar installation (panels are installed, but we’re still waiting for the bureaucrats approval and meter installation to activate them), we went to a friends house to experiment with his installation.
At the end of the front cover post I mentioned that we were working with a plastic sheet supplier to design an adhesive protector for the cover. I was pretty excited when I got the package today, but that excitement quickly turned into rage and frustration as soon as I opened it: the parts that should have been transparent are red instead.
Continue reading Front cover protection and dealing with suppliers
This post is written by my friend (and now colleague/intern :) ) [Michele], who worked on the test board. I assigned him this task as it’s the best way to learn about the boards and get up to speed with the project. It also seemed a great way to test the really interesting Exclave project from [bunnie], but -spoiler alert- we’ll have to wait for that.
After manufacturing the boards, we need to test them to make sure that the assembly house built them correctly. This is my first time designing a nail bed, however the task seems quite simple. I have to test the following:
Now that I tested and improved the proof of concepts for power, energy measurement, control and car interfacing, I can merge everything in a single block that fits in a nice box. As discussed in the enclosure post, I choose to use a 3DIN standard box so I looked around for options.
While I am definitely a hardware guy, I also really like to write software, either as the firmware for the devices I build or as quick hacks to improve my daily routines. I’ve always been a Windows guy because all electronics development software was only available for that platform until recently, and I have a love/hate relationship with Linux: I tried many times to use it as my main OS, but I always had to revert to windows for one reason or another (but mostly laziness, I must admit).
This post is written by my friend (and now colleague/intern :) ) Michele.
Our target users for Prism are mostly hackers and passionate people playing around with EV technology; for this reason we strive to make Prism as safe as possible even for the most edge cases.
We thought a lot about the user interface for our charging station. After ditching the infinite mirror idea, we wanted something simple and elegant, inspired from the Tesla wall charger, so we started experimenting with RGB LEDs strips. The first version of the cover for the plastic case was a laser-cut polycarbonate sheet, with a LED-strip taped to the back: