Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
63 Educational Development Board for RoboThink
Anthony Shvets
Zhe Tang
Zipeng Wang design_document0.pdf
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Project Members are:
Anthony Shvets : shvets2
Zhe Tang: zhetang2

The purpose and focus of this project will be to develop a control board for a flexible robotics building system. The system as a whole would allow young students to easily create their own robotic designs outfitted with servo motors, DC motors, and Sensors while also being easily programmable using color (where unique colors would result in unique actions).

An example I would like to bring up is of a student that builds a robot with DC motors controlling the wheels for movement, a servo motor for a claw at the front of the robot and a few color sensors to detect a drawn path and spots near the path to issue an action. This robot would start traveling straight and its color sensor detects the color blue (let’s say this means turn left) and the robot turns left roughly 90 degrees. Then it continues until the sensor detects orange (let’s say this means close servo) and the robot grips an object in front of it, turns around and then continues traveling until it detects another actionable color or a stop condition, which could be a unique color or combination of colors across multiple color sensors.

The benefit this provides young kids is to work with programmable robots from a very early age, due to the easy to understand color based coding system, and also be able adapt those robots to different shapes and functions.

Again, the focus of the project will be around the control board. Not the development of the plastics and motors used in the robots as those are already developed. The control board will be able to control DC motors, Servo motors, and will take input from at least 4 color sensors (2 for path detection and ~2 for action detection).

Low Cost Distributed Battery Management System

Logan Rosenmayer, Daksh Saraf

Low Cost Distributed Battery Management System

Featured Project

Web Board Link: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=27207

Block Diagram: https://imgur.com/GIzjG8R

Members: Logan Rosenmayer (Rosenma2), Anthony Chemaly(chemaly2)

The goal of this project is to design a low cost BMS (Battery Management System) system that is flexible and modular. The BMS must ensure safe operation of lithium ion batteries by protecting the batteries from: Over temperature, overcharge, overdischarge, and overcurrent all at the cell level. Additionally, the should provide cell balancing to maintain overall pack capacity. Last a BMS should be track SOC(state of charge) and SOH (state of health) of the overall pack.

To meet these goals, we plan to integrate a MCU into each module that will handle measurements and report to the module below it. This allows for reconfiguration of battery’s, module replacements. Currently major companies that offer stackable BMSs don’t offer single cell modularity, require software adjustments and require sense wires to be ran back to the centralized IC. Our proposed solution will be able to remain in the same price range as other centralized solutions by utilizing mass produced general purpose microcontrollers and opto-isolators. This project carries a mix of hardware and software challenges. The software side will consist of communication protocol design, interrupt/sleep cycles, and power management. Hardware will consist of communication level shifting, MCU selection, battery voltage and current monitoring circuits, DC/DC converter all with low power draws and cost. (uAs and ~$2.50 without mounting)