Designing Hardware for Integration Testing

Our team here at Knackforge is constantly working on new improvements and integrations for our mechatronics applications. One such new hardware integration is a Battery Management System, or BMS.

There are many levels of testing that our integrations have to pass to prepare a product for release. It’s not enough for our hardware to pass the test of “Does it do what we want to do?” If you want to drive a car on a hot summer day, you likely want something more than the vehicle simply being drivable – you’d want your air conditioning system to work as well. It’s the same principle for our integrations here at Knackforge – is our product the best product for what we need it to do? Let’s look at our BMS hardware integration.

We could simply make sure that the hardware receives the correct inputs and gives us the correct outputs, but we want to make sure our integrations meet the actual need and requirements. Our BMS will be used for drone mechatronics applications in situations involving high power usage for very short amounts of time. Before flying a drone with untested hardware, we wanted to design a hardware-based testing rig that can run the new integration through its paces. It’s not a good idea to have moving pieces in this situation – A mounted motor and propellor in motion could break and damage surrounding items. We have to consider heat and power limitations as well because we don’t want to overload our new hardware before the integration testing even begins. 

Our hardware solution for our new integration was elegant but simple: a series of resistors able to withstand high amounts of current in a configuration to approximate a drone in flight and enough space to dissipate all the heat while our integration testing is in progress. We also wanted the rig to be run autonomously via software and have the data accessible from anywhere at any time, so we added a Raspberry pi connected to the internet to relay data and a video feed. This will ensure that we can monitor our integration testing around the clock. 

The team at Knackforge is committed to thoroughly testing all new hardware integrations to ensure that our customers are completely satisfied with our products.