the spingarage blog

The FroBoard was an interesting experiment for me. It was my first experience in releasing a product, and in all honesty it was the first PCB design I'd ever taken to completion. It was never my intent to sell millions of them- I designed it for my own use, and decided to use it as a pilot product for spingarage. It was there to establish spingarage as a real business, and also to take me through some of the inevitable growing pains of releasing a product without risking a full-size electric vehicle motor. I think it served its purpose very well, and I hope that those that purchased FroBoards are equally satisfied. My email address is still at your disposal for tech support, should you need it, and the PCB layouts and schematics are available here for those interested in building their own.

I learned a lot in the process of designing and marketing the FroBoard. Most of this is described in pretty FroBoard-specific terms, but it should be generally applicable to most niche-market electronic products. Here are the top 6 things that come to mind, in no particular order.

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So I take pretty crappy pictures. For what it's worth, these were the 10 most... uh... these were 10 things I found in my travels around NAIAS 2012.

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An Intel 8080 microprocessor die. Image courtesy of Intel Corporation.

I recently read an article on Co.Design that put the design of modern-day programming languages under pretty heavy scrutiny (kudos go to John Pavlus for taking on this topic). The article cited some pretty damning facts- new programmers were equally as successful programming in Randomo, a language made up of randomly-generated syntax, as they were when programming in Perl. It also provided two code examples, which I found particularly interesting. The first was Quorum, "whose design was informed by surveys, usability studies, and field tests." Quorum looks like this:

integer i = 0

repeat 10 times

i = i + 1

end

The second example comes from Java. An equivalent-ish snippet to the above Quorum example looks like this:

for(int i = 0;i < 10;i++){

}

I'm not particularly interested in arguing that Java is easier to read than Quorum. It just isn't. In the example above, however, I happen to prefer Java. My reasoning has nothing to do with readability or intuition. It is, however, directly related to the purity of the design of the final product.

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The FroBoard design is now available for free- but this won't do you much good if you don't know what a FroBoard is. So here is the original text from the product page!

The FroBoard is a program-it-yourself development board designed to take the black magic out of brushless DC motor control. We’ve taken the time to engineer all the nitty gritty circuit board stuff, so you can focus on the ultimate goal: making stuff spin.

The FroBoard includes all of the hardware necessary to drive the power section of a brushless motor controller. A functional controller can be built with nothing more than a FroBoard, 6 MOSFETs or IGBTs, and a little ingenuity. Here’s what’s on the board:

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We're very thankful for those of you who have supported spingarage or taken an interest in our work, and we'd like to prove it. As our way of saying thanks this holiday season, we're making the FroBoard design available to the world for free. Click here to download a ~6mb ZIP file containing the PCB layout, schematic, assembly details, and user's guide. We hope you find it as useful as we have!

If you have no idea what a FroBoard is, click here to find out!

Once again, a warm thanks goes to all of you. Merry Christmas!

//AGA

It's also free, which doesn't hurt anything.

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//AGA

I've had a couple of inquiries about using very large IGBTs with the FroBoard. The largest modules I've used with it are Fuji 1MBI300F-060 IGBTs- these have a gate capacitance of about 30nF, which is certainly enough to weigh down a gate driver. I was able to switch six of these at 30kHz. This was sluggish, but functional. Sadly, once you get into the 600+ amp ratings, things go pretty crazy. I have a PRX CM600HA-24H module with an input capacitance of 120nF. Anyway, I finally got enough free time to sit down and explore the situation a little further, and see if there were any ways to make the FroBoard a little snappier when working with big capacitances.

I tested the gate drivers by loading them down with two different capacitances- the first test was with a 0.1uF capacitor, the second was with three 0.01uF capacitors in parallel. This simulated the CM600H and the 1MBI300F modules, respectively.

The 0.1uF was clearly too much. The current gate drivers and power supplies just can't handle that much capacitance.

The 0.03uF pseudo-cap was a tad sluggish but not too horrible. You can see what its charge curve looks like below.

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Any company that has managed to secure not only the name Simple but the URL simple.com is destined for greatness. I have to say that my first impressions leave me feeling like Simple is more than deserving of its title. I found out about them on Co.Design, and a few days later I acquired an iPad (woot) and found myself looking for mobile banking solutions. Simple popped right up in the hierarchy of my thoughts, and I decided to do a little further investigation.

Right off the bat, I got a good feeling. The Simple website is gorgeous, friendly, and inviting. Lots of whitespace. Whitespace makes me happy. It's also very well written. It's easy to see what's going on, and the invitation request form is a beautiful thing in and of itself. Needless to say, I wanted in.

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I wanted a picture for this one. Nothing I found really worked.

I was talking to a close friend earlier about the social dynamics of people on the internet, and it sparked some pretty interesting points of view. There are a few common phenomena associated with the way people act on the internet- people act like absolute jackasses when commenting on YouTube videos, they expose themselves to strangers on Chatroulette, and bully others cruelly (and tragically, to the point of suicide) using various avenues such as Facebook and, yes, blogs. I got a blunt introduction to this kind of behavior when news of my first electric car conversion hit the AOL home page (apparently there were still a few people using AOL back then).

This kind of behavior is usually attributed to the thrill of anonymity afforded by the internet and the insular effect of a keyboard- at the most superficial level, this sounds perfectly valid to me. People give into more primal instincts that they wouldn't indulge if they were subject to accountability and the self-regulating effect of society. They are also insulated from the reality of the fact that the personalities they are communicating with or about are very real people- words don't have heartbeats, they don't breath faster when they get nervous, and you can't see the pain in their eyes when they hear what you have to say (Arguably. I've always felt like the best writers can more effectively provoke emotion). This dehumanizing effect makes the internet a playground for ruthlessness.

I think there is a more fundamental problem at the root of these seemingly basic human flaws. The problem has to do with the design of the channels people use to communicate on the internet. It's the epitome of, you guessed it, a fundamentally flawed design.

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