Rising Edge Engineering

09/22/2021

04/06/2021

First video, kinda nervous 😅 I was recommended to share by a couple friends. Not sure if there are many people in the motorsports community that will take DIY this far but in case there are fellow geeks and programmers out there, here's something I've been working on the past couple weeks.

hey all, hoping to have a lot more cohesive version of what's going on here in the description.this is a project I've been working on and I've been encourage...

11/17/2020

Here's a little something we've been working on. A splice pack based on a Deutsch DT 12 pin connector. This terminates them all to an m8 stud, which makes it a breeze to terminate multiple smaller wires to the chassis at one singular point. The board comes in 2 varieties: a 2oz board rated for 40 amps, and a 4oz board rated for 70 amps. The housing is 3d printed in ASA and should be fine long-term in the engine bay as long as it is not near exhaust headers. The goal is to aim for $30 for the 1oz version and $35 for the 2 oz version.

Let us know what your thoughts are! We are planning to add mounting tabs to the sides of the case and even produce a panel-mount version to go through a firewall or something similar, if people are interested.

11/13/2020

I was thinking about the way my cable throttle feels so non-linear in power delivery and how a more linear feel with drive by wire could be achieved. The idea for these calculations is looking at only 2d area from a forward view of a throttle body and estimating actual flow past the throttle by the "free flow area" inside the throttle body. Not sure if this is useful and I'd love to test it out for myself but the race car is down for the foreseeable future so maybe someone else could use these calculations and test them out. Might be the type of thing to provide better power modulation with the throttle. These values are not related to throttle size either, the math works out to make the percentages exactly the same.
This could easily be implemented by using the left column as pedal position and the right column as target throttle body position.

11/02/2020

Received my first SMT assembled boards today. Turned out great! What you see here is a breakout for an Infineon Profet+2 and a very rudimentary controller board that will end up being a low-current open-source PDM of sorts to control interior and exterior lights, indicators, fans and HVAC things, etc.

10/29/2020

When the connector you need only comes in PCB form, find terminals that work and model your own housing around that terminal. Then you can 3d print your own connectors! Here's my first attempt at this and it turned out perfectly!

07/20/2020

After rocking a little tool bag for a couple years, I finally got a tool cart for all my wiring tools! This was so satisfying to piece together and put terminals into organizers!

07/07/2020

A little off-topic from my usual electronics stuff, but I'm building a cool suit and found these dry-disconnect fittings for about 1/4 the price of the standard ones people used. These are made by the same company, cpc. These are 9 dollars per side and the dual channel makes it easier to disconnect both in one press. I got them from U.S. plastics corporation.

06/24/2020

When I was 18 I worked at a summer camp and saved up to buy my own set of tools to be able to work on my own car. A friend knew an old lady whose husband had passed away and she was trying to get rid of some of his tools. He was apparently a sheet metal worker so he had these little aluminum trays he had made that had tools just thrown in them. There was a lot but it was messy. I saw a couple snap on extensions but nothing too crazy. I gave her $225 USD and got a couple bins of tools, a small drill press, and a bench grinder. There ended up being a lot of snap on stuff, tons of craftsman and husky sockets and such. I found this stuff at the bottom of one of the bins, and it wasn't til a couple years ago that I realized the treasure chest I had stumbled into. I use all the tools years later and the capability that these tools gave me has fostered a love of wrenching and motorsports wiring. Whoever the lady's husband was, I hope he rests easy knowing that his tools inspired me.

06/24/2020

Info dump inbound! I found these Mitsubishi/Mazda PWM modules that are used in some vehicles to control the radiator fans. These things look beefy so I was curious to open one up and do some testing on a bench. The connectors were hard to find. The little 2-pin is a Sumitomo 6189-0425 and the large power connector is a Sumitomo 6189-0588. I have 9 sets (2 small connectors and the one big connector, all terminals and seals included) available for sale, for $20 shipped to the continental U.S. I also have a ton of 2-pin SPAL fan connectors for sale if anyone wants to bundle.

Anyway, here's what I found. It takes a 50-250Hz low-side PWM signal to control the fans. It steps it up to about 20kHz (20.24kHz measured on the o-scope) and drives the low side of the fans with a large MOSFET. This high frequency signal makes zero noise and the motors are smooth as can be, generating no heat outside of the ordinary. I've had this in my car for 6 months now and it's been perfect. It will hold any duty cycle you feed to it (in 5% increments) and has a built-in soft start feature, so if you switch the input on, it will ramp up the fan speed automatically over the course of 4-5 seconds. The controller itself only draws 3mA when idle and 18mA when driving the output.

Internally, there is a large transient voltage supression diode, a bunch of capacitors, a voltage reg, a microcontroller, a to220 N-channel MOSFET being driven in a push-pull configuration by some transistors, and dual flyback diodes in a to220 form factor on the outputs. The flyback diode and the MOSFET are attached to a large heatsink. It is supposedly capable of 40A output total, and I have driven 2 spal fans (12.4A and 14A) for 6 months with zero issues. I got my actual module on amazon for under 20 dollars.