Intelligent Uninterruptible Power Supply
Dr. Mario
Posts: 331
As I had to hold off Dendou Oni (it's not dead, but had to be put on backburner for a bit), I have been thinking about building a better UPS for this supercomputer (which would be helpful as blackout / brownout is unpredictable.
Here is what I have been thinking to put together - technical specification:
* 6.4 or 12.8 Volts DC / 10 or 20 Amps per hour Lithium-Ion + Iron Phosphate batteries (for longer battery life expectancy - about +2,000 cycles and longer runtime for lighter load such as computer with 400W SMPS and a LCD monitor)
* "Hybrid" computing platform with Parallax Propeller P8X32A-M44 and Freescale MPC555 microcontrollers
* Front panel control (some switches for controlling the way it should act, like reset and Power On / Off for example)
* Front panel graphic vacuum fluorescent display (this one is much more reliable for this application) for displaying remaining battery runtime (in Backup mode), battery charging status, and voltage / hertzs / current being implemented.
* Intelligent load adaption with 450V DC bias rail and digitally-controlled PFC transformer / H-bridge for converting 450VDC into 100 / 120VAC pure sinewave current to be fed to the protected equipments. (450V is for to feed an additional current into power-demand devices, such as a large squirrel-cage AC induction motor, which is common on the air compressor and in the non-switchmode air conditioner, to name a few.)
Here, this UPS I may build should be capable of feeding either 120 Volts or 100 Volts for any sensitive equipment (such as computers) that asks for it, and AC frequency - 50 or 60 hertzs is also user-selectable on the front panel control. Why both 120 and 100V? Japanese and American equipments uses the same plug prongs (JA1-15p/r and NEMA 5-15p/r standards are both the same except for two things, voltage and frequency), so why not?
Anyways, I am truly curious about few things: How the Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) should be done by either microcontroller chips? (You don't have to answer about PowerPC one, if you don't know - Propeller would do.) And, exactly how different the RS232 IO routine should be handled by a dedicated Propeller microcontroller to "print" something on the graphic vacuum fluorescent display, and should the OBEX RS232 object's internal routines be modified to treat this MCU as a master device and GVFD a slave device?
Here is what I have been thinking to put together - technical specification:
* 6.4 or 12.8 Volts DC / 10 or 20 Amps per hour Lithium-Ion + Iron Phosphate batteries (for longer battery life expectancy - about +2,000 cycles and longer runtime for lighter load such as computer with 400W SMPS and a LCD monitor)
* "Hybrid" computing platform with Parallax Propeller P8X32A-M44 and Freescale MPC555 microcontrollers
* Front panel control (some switches for controlling the way it should act, like reset and Power On / Off for example)
* Front panel graphic vacuum fluorescent display (this one is much more reliable for this application) for displaying remaining battery runtime (in Backup mode), battery charging status, and voltage / hertzs / current being implemented.
* Intelligent load adaption with 450V DC bias rail and digitally-controlled PFC transformer / H-bridge for converting 450VDC into 100 / 120VAC pure sinewave current to be fed to the protected equipments. (450V is for to feed an additional current into power-demand devices, such as a large squirrel-cage AC induction motor, which is common on the air compressor and in the non-switchmode air conditioner, to name a few.)
Here, this UPS I may build should be capable of feeding either 120 Volts or 100 Volts for any sensitive equipment (such as computers) that asks for it, and AC frequency - 50 or 60 hertzs is also user-selectable on the front panel control. Why both 120 and 100V? Japanese and American equipments uses the same plug prongs (JA1-15p/r and NEMA 5-15p/r standards are both the same except for two things, voltage and frequency), so why not?
Anyways, I am truly curious about few things: How the Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) should be done by either microcontroller chips? (You don't have to answer about PowerPC one, if you don't know - Propeller would do.) And, exactly how different the RS232 IO routine should be handled by a dedicated Propeller microcontroller to "print" something on the graphic vacuum fluorescent display, and should the OBEX RS232 object's internal routines be modified to treat this MCU as a master device and GVFD a slave device?
Comments
I will get some more parts for Dendou Oni as time passes by, and we should get information on Propeller II very soon: Ken Gracey have put up the thread "for hire" to get some more helps on the Parallax Tools, maybe you are already aware of that.
Why is it on hold? Simple: I have bills and they are a murder. However, I intend to try and do both in time as it gets smoothed out. And having more powerful PC is going to be a big help here!
Also, messing around with UPS may give me an opportunity to learn a bit more of discrete opcode programming on MPC555 (PowerPC processors have slightly different CPU microcode table, as mentioned in Power ISA whitepapers) so I should get a bit more coverage before I screw around with more powerful PowerPC embedded CPU for Dendou Oni (SATA hard drive may be needed here for holding the Propeller II data and Propeller 1G / 2G both are similar to PowerPC in term of microcode handling procedures and the way they load their RAM registers so there's no reason why they will not cooperate when working with each other).
Oh, and PCB can be quite expensive in limited quantities (BGA-friendly multi-layered ones, which I will have to do away with, are the worst - guess we cannot have everything).
BTW, I have 4 Megabytes Cypress SRAM which I think is configured for x8 data links - which may let me cheat a bit, and use SDRAM for the add-on stackable cards. (2MB ones that I also have may be, but is actually too fast - 12ns (245MHz design speed) - it's also interesting to note its BGA package, it's funny-looking - rectangle, with three solder balls at each of the corners, all GND or just dummy.)