Sunday, March 25, 2012

So I decided to build a scooter...

...and of course, it has bricks on it.
Behold, the monstrosity that is BrickScooter:
Rear Shot
Full View
Oh Hai, Bricks!
Water cooling
It's not finished yet (I have to hook up the drivetrain and, more importantly, build all the control electronics for the motor controller), but at least it's beginning to take shape.
The structural bits are made of machined aluminum plate, and the front fork is a stock Razor A3 steering column assembly (complete with stock wheel!). Motor is a Turnigy TR80-100-B motor, nominally rated for 6500W@130A, but actually good for quite a bit less in vehicle duty.

The bricks are mystery Semikron MOSFET modules. Because they were a custom run for GE, they have no public datasheets. Empirical testing says they are 110V, 2 mOhm, and given the usual brick dissipation of 1KW this puts them at 300A.

Why does it exist? I haven't a clue. I suppose motor controllers and scooters are very popular at MITERS, where I spend much of my time. And I like high power stuff, and bricks, and designing nice controllers for things (I'm intending for this to have sinusoidal output and current control).

Also, I fully intend to win the 2.007 drag race with this thing. A hundred amps and a full Melon should be hard to beat if I can get the mechanical stuff right.

Friday, March 23, 2012

SR2 part 2

...time for the hex cores! So I found these processors on Ebay...
Above CPU-Z screenshot says it all. A0 Xeons are remarkably good at overclocking; 1.3 Vcore and 4 GHz is nothing to sneeze at (many Gulftowns require 1.4V+ to achieve this). The lower stock Vcore (1.0V) helps too I suppose.
Unfortunately the board can no longer hold the highest Turbo multiplier, meaning Turbo is out of the question, as during boot, a 23x multiplier will kick in, causing a crash. And it is well-accepted that going over 200 BCLK on air on an SR-2 is seriously past the point of diminishing returns, so 4GHz is my board-limited overclock.