Power Controller Design

In an effort to make the plane less susceptible to lighting on fire we're working on redesigning the power control system. The main task here is to design a control board which is used to tell all the big chunky relays who should be on, and when. This controller is in the midst of being designed currently, the prototyping has been completed and schematic made, next step is PCB layout.

The main idea behind the power controller is to provide the ability to manually control busses, as well as add tripping logic. It will give us the abililty to place emergency cutoff buttons in the cockpit (handy for when we start motorizing things), and pressing it will kill power to the jet. It also will protect from power interruptions and probably some other stuff. The other feature is the override controls, which will give us the ability to manually override bus states, meaning we can force a bus to turn on or off regardless of what the sim wants. This is especially handy for when the sim isn't running, which is basically all the time when we're working on the plane. It's a real pain neededing to run the sim and have everything connected and working, just to get power on it. Once we get the recirc fan connected to the plane we can also force that to run which will be real nice on hot summer days. The board also has lots of indicator lights and some other boring stuff. More to come in future posts...