PilotPete
Well-known member
- First Name
- Pete
- Joined
- May 8, 2023
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- Vehicles
- Porsche, BMW, M3LR on order
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- Chief Pilot
EM doesn’t do “one offs”. So I’m thinking about all the “traditional” 12v motors. Then I’m watching his discussion about Optimus. Made the comment that they had to custom make all the actuators. I wonder if all the actuators are 48v on Optimus. Could the development of those actuators be used on the CT? Don’t see why not. Same for the video and sound functions of the bot. If the CT is using 30X SS off the SpaceX contract, why not use actuators off the Optimus project.Thanks for the post and list.
There's actually a couple on there I have to add to mine....and made me think of Airbags as well
I think that patent video Cybergus posted confirmed enough of my assumptions so I could move on to another subject, but here goes a quick recap of my thought process so far.
BTW I'm interested in learning more about it, than just spewing a whole bunch of words, but I also often feel that many don't bother to explain in more detail what they mean to really engage, so I try to be better, which I agree at times can go the opposite way, especially if there is little to no feedback loop.
There might be some additional confusion if one perceives the argument to only be about changing to 48V from 12V as the thread title would suggest. In reality the "WHOLE" system architecture is changing, not just some of the voltages along the line, and these changes are more significant than the change to 48V by itself.
Anyhoo...back to the system architecture. Let me quote my response to Cybergus patent video first as a quick reminder:
Now I can imagine from a voltage perspective this distributed setup would have a 48V bus voltage between the distributed controllers, which I believe are all the red nodules on the drawing above, but possibly only the blue line in the drawing. Then at each controller, you could have a few buck converters with enough capacity, and the right voltage to handle the endpoint loads. This way you can aggregate the buck converters into larger more cost effective units together with the controller, which then acts as a distribution hub for the endpoints, and powers and controls them. In some cases those controllers could also have built in motor controllers as well to drive the smaller things, like fans, windows or seat motors, at any voltage that makes sense for them.
This architecture does a few notable things:
Note these are all answers to comments I made against running "everything only" on 48V, and I think the above solution to divide and conquer makes for a better architecture overall, in that it allows all the things to run on the voltages it needs too, without forcing everything to change to 48V.
- It allows for a single high power cable to run as a bus at 48V along the full length of the vehicle. Which makes a worthwhile difference in cable dimensioning, in that it is long, and at 12V would need to be large to handle that amount of power. Probably in the 1-3kW range, unless they run the 110V inverter from it, in which case it would have to be 3x the size at that power level.
- It acts as a spine, in that no "long" and "heavy" low voltage cables have to run back to a single central point, rather only back to the nearest bus and controller, from where the endpoint can be supplied with the appropriate voltage. This reduces losses on lower voltages under 48V by shortening the wire length for those, and at the same time aggregates the buck/motor controllers so that having a 48V bus is worth it by running at a higher load.
- The controllers could be modular, in that you would possibly only need 1-3 different types, and could reuse them across the vehicle for different things. This would bring down the overall part count, without any loss of features.
- It allows the gradual replacement of non-optimised OEM parts with dedicated Tesla parts, and still offers the flexibility to run endpoints that might need a specific voltage that is less than 48V.
Overall I'm pretty happy with that, as well as spending some time finding out how they are doing it, and discussing the matter, with future projects of my own in mind. I learnt something.
Then I started thinking, is one of the goals of project Highland to move to a 48v architecture as well?
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