Man Bag

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I took a six-week vacation with the family and, fearing build withdraw, I made a man bag to bring some electronics along. Needless to say my wife wasn’t happy — something along the lines of “NFW are you bringing that!”.

Joel made a bench harness so that I could start to get my brain wrapped around the MoTeC display, Power Distribution Module (PDM), keypad, rotary keypad, Dual Half Bridge (DHB) and CAN bus. The test harness is first rate; Deutsch connectors, Raychem DR-25 sheath, labels on everything and detailed documentation.

My plan is to focus on the basics and leave all of the complex ECU and tuning stuff to the pros. Even so, MoTeC isn’t geared for DIY’ers, so Joel is providing tutoring lessons via a remote desktop application— my kids think it’s hilarious that the old man still needs tutoring.

One of the primary objectives with a MoTeC setup is to replace as many physical fuses as possible with PDU outputs which have configurable current limits, automated retries, logic and logging. For this reason, the harness powers the display via a PDU output. The first step was to configure the name of the output. Like software, it’s a good idea to provide robust names. Since it’s part of the bench tester and it powers the C127 display, the keypad and a spare power connector, I named it “Output.BenchTester.C127/Keypad/Spare”. To power it, I simply created a condition as can be seen in the snippet from the PDM Manager below. When then PDM has power, the display, keypad and spare power connecter have power.

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I didn’t get very far with things, mostly because I had a poor internet connection which made the remote sessions difficult. However, I was able to get the keypad buttons to activate turn signals, the hazard and to activate the DHB.

Now that I’m back home, I’m going to get things kicked into high gear!