●? Tesla quickly turned the UI and HMI of the central control panel+entertainment system into a medical instrument, and put the upper control algorithm on it.
●? Tesla's body electronic integrated controller provides different sensor conditioning circuits (acquisition) and drive control, and with the intelligent management of batteries, the ECU-level software that we spend more time at the bottom can also be quickly replaced;
●? Combined with the development of OS around information system by various car companies, a large number of underlying functions are abstracted and done upwards, and the future car electronics is indeed very similar to other industrial products.
Part? 1? Medtronic PB560 ventilator information
I think Medtronic is a company with social responsibility. In order to alleviate the deficiency of the ventilator, the design drawings of its portable PB560 ventilator are all open source, including software, hardware (BOM+PCBA) and structural drawings. As shown in the figure below, we can know what this ventilator contains. The basic function of the ventilator is to assist the patient to breathe, including the pressure control of the gas path, the pressure monitoring of the whole circuit and the humidity monitoring of the circuit, which is a set of medical demand-based functions. In practical work, because it is related to patients' lives, the whole system includes its own fault diagnosis functions, including high and low voltage power alarm, patient suffocation alarm, high/low humidity alarm, flow monitoring alarm, basic oxygen supply pipeline alarm, ventilator power supply system alarm, battery system fault alarm, communication alarm and so on.
Figure 1? Basic functions of Medtronic ventilator
According to several boards in PB569, including power supply. Supply? Board of directors, power? Pack2、BuzzerBoard、CPU？ Board and battery board, the whole system structure is relatively simple. The core is the input sensor detection and output valve in our previous automobile ECU and the air pump control based on PWM.
Figure 2? Schematic diagram of electronic control of Medtronic ventilator
As for the production difficulty of this product, as shown in the following figure, because the market is relatively stable and the ventilator is a product that needs strong control, even if Medtronic is open source, it will take a long time to improve the output from PCBA proofing, finding parts and burning software, and the design and selection of these parts may be old. Under the current conditions, it is difficult for you to mass-produce according to the existing materials.
Figure 3? Power supply configuration of ventilator
Part? 2? Tesla's prototype ventilator
Tesla's team of engineers is very flexible and interesting, because the principle of the ventilator is not as complicated as mentioned in the video, and it only takes some time to change the HVAC system of the vehicle to the requirements of the ventilator. Their approach is to use the components in the car and reassemble them according to the system schematic diagram. It is divided into automobile original parts, other parts (mainly detection sensors) and medical parts. The following is the overall structural block diagram made by Tesla. As mentioned above, the core problem is to control the input pressure of oxygen and the control of overall flow, pressure and humidity.
Figure 4? Tesla ventilator block diagram
Tesla actually skipped Medtronic's embedded system to control a single controller, but adopted Model? The entertainment system on 3/Y is used for top-level control (Tesla is developed based on Linux here), sensors and drivers, and body controllers (including VC? Front and VC? Second from the right, one is power distribution function+one control function) to control the variable valve to exchange information, and quickly interact with the system on the 15 inch screen according to the development of its own system GUI, and adjust the air pressure, flow and gas volume.
Remarks: The prototype system is equipped with 12V battery and external power supply.
Figure 5? Tesla's ventilator control unit
In fact, according to my understanding, this integrated system architecture is more common in future cars. What kind of end is advocated by Volkswagen/Audi? Where to? The core of End(E2E) architecture is our own information system OS. Given the miraculous change of ID.3, we can also get a system based on onboard domain controller soon. Theoretically, this development time may be faster than that of the underlying ECU, especially since it is not a particularly real-time task.
Figure 6? Audi's E3 Electronic Architecture
Conclusion:
Recently, I have been collecting the information of on-board computing platforms, and this trend is still obvious. In fact, different car companies are consistent in adopting this set of things, but there are still differences on how to deal with the relationship with suppliers and how to build their own software centers (how much work to do).
Author's brief introduction: Zhu Yulong, senior engineer of three electric systems and automotive electronics for electric vehicles, is the author of Hardware Design of Automotive Electronics.
Figure | Zhu Yulong? Network and related screenshots
This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.