Skip to main content

The Motobrain Story

Motobrain began when I decided my options for a vehicle fuse panel where too limited. I wanted something better. A buddy and I started chatting about what we might want from a fuse block and I started drawing schematics and making prototypes. My first idea was an actual fuse panel that could measure system voltage and total current draw and had fused circuits. It's "killer" feature was that all the outputs were interchangeable so you could select the type of output you wanted. It had card slots and the card slots and the cards I developed with for high side switching, low side switching, USB charging, and analog inputs. It was cool, but not really durable enough for an automotive environment.
 

It was going to be controlled from a dedicated unit wired to the gizmo above. The more I thought that through, the more that was foolish since we all have computers in our pockets already, our smart phones. So I did a full reboot and decided to do a Bluetooth 4 gizmo, that was completely weatherproof. That meant I needed to get rid of the fuses and the interchangeable cards. The most practical card was the high side switching card so I decided to go with those. I designed in 8 channels because it was enough for most setups I could imagine and still was a comfortable size to fit on any vehicle. Motobrain was born.



It has gone through several variations mainly surrounding the signal inputs and how the current and signal actually go in and out of the Motobrain. In the photo above, you can see that system was designed with wires terminated inside the potted electronics. That is an easy way to do it but requires that I supply the wire and that it is right for all the customers needs. That seems like a big "if" to me, so redesigned the output board with screw down terminals and I have finally found the product I want to sell.


Then I needed to figure out how to cast these things. This is not a skill I've ever learned so it took some time to figure it out. At first, I thought I would 3D print the mold in hard plastic, place the electronics in that and then pour in the resin. It seemed like a fine idea. It wasn't. I burned a couple grand on that before I gave up.
 
 
 


I ultimately got pretty good at this technique...



...but this is just not how to do this job though. People kept telling me to make a silicone mold and it will be easy. I fought the idea because I didn't want to learn yet another skill when I was this far down the road. It was necessary though, so I purchased Solidworks and drew up a perfect replica of Motobrain and had it 3D printed.
 

Then I ordered some fancy silicone and cast some fake Motobrains to learn how.


  

When I was finally confident that I figured it out I made some REAL ones.

Here is where we are today. Read the entire story at our blog.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Capacitive-Touch Janko Keyboard: What I Did at the 2017 Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon

Last weekend (February 10-12, 2017) I made a Janko-layout capacitive-touch keyboard for the Moog Werkstatt at the Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon. The day after (Monday the 13th), I made this short video of the keyboard being played: "Capacitive Touch Janko Keyboard for Moog Werkstatt" (Text from the video doobly doo) This is a Janko-layout touch keyboard I made at the 2017 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech, February 10-12. I'm playing a few classic bass and melody lines from popular and classic tunes. I only have one octave (13 notes) connected so far. The capacitive touch sensors use MPR121 capacitive-touch chips, on breakout boards from Adafruit (Moog Hackathon sponsor Sparkfun makes a similar board for the same chip). The example code from Adafruit was modified to read four boards (using the Adafruit library and making four sensor objects and initializing each to one of the four I2C addresses is remarkably easy for anyone with moderate familiarity with C++), and

Building an enclosure for the LulzBot AO 100

As the cold weather season arrives in Atlanta, with it comes issues with our 3D printers. Specifically problems with temperatures and print stability. Freeside is essentially a big warehouse, and our 3D printing station is setup in the large open area in the front of the space. What this means is that when it is cold in the space, this will affect the printing quality because the ambient temperature is far lower than what is optimal for thermoplastics. The cold ambient air will cause parts to rapidly cool during the middle of a print. And with materials like ABS which can shrink dramatically during cooling, this causes prints to warp, deform, and delaminate during and after printing is finished. The print on the left is showing signs of delamination from plastic cooling mid print. To remedy this, we built an acrylic enclosure for our LulzBot AO-100, which is our dedicated ABS printer. We tested the proof of concept of whether an enclosure would help mitigate printing problem

Build-Out Recap!

A bunch of great stuff got done at the build-out yesterday. A huge thanks to everyone that came out to pitch in! Here are some pictures to recap the projects... Randy's team hung the curtain to the workshop to create more of a barrier between the front of the house and back of the house and to control dust levels a bit more. We'll be finishing the top of the wall soon, but the hard part's already done. Karen, Donald, Tom, Violet, and James framed the doorway to the Media Lab and Bio Lab and hung the door for that area. Next step is AC! Michelle and Mary's team cleaned out project storage and moved the shelves over so that Neils could put the flammability cabinets in that area. That allowed all of us with the help of Adam and Nathan to clean up the workshop and really tidy up. They also sorted out all of the laser cutter raw materials and cut them down to a usable size on the table saw.  For the portal clouds, JW, Nathan, and Kat rolled an aw