Using data logging to characterize an electric vehicle

Shane Colton has refined the TinyCross vehicle and does some analysis:

I wanted to do some more thorough data logging in 4WD to characterize some of the issues I’ve felt while just driving around for fun. The steering wheel PCB collects data from the front and rear motor drives over CAN, appends some of its own data, and writes the whole thing to a microSD card. When I first set this up, I just had it overwrite the existing data log every power cycle. But in the couple of years since I set that up, I’ve had to master FatFs. So setting it up to create new files on the fly without messing up any of the real-time stuff was an easy upgrade.

I think I’ll finally have to dive in to writing some simple traction/launch control software. Just looking at the 4x80A launch data, it’s easy to pick out the wheel that’s slipping and imagine that the software could just fold back the current command to that wheel as its speed starts to diverge from the other three. But there are so many logical knots on the path to generalizing that to 4WD, where any subset of the four wheels could be slipping, that it makes my brain hurt to even think about.

See the video below and more in the blog post.


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