Progress

Here are the designs for the cards I am making.

The first I call "Input" which has some protection for the 15V inputs for the Concept Card. This will be the hardest to make as it is two sided and may be difficult to line up. I haven't made this yet.
The next image is "Switch" which takes the 5v from the sanguino and switches it to 15V and also takes the 15v status signal from the concept and knocks it down to 5V. I made this last night, and it turned out pretty good.
On both these cards I tried to keep the power rails on the outside and signal wires in the middle. Hopefully they will be pretty robust from a noise perspective.
The picture on the previous post was "Output" which takes the output from the Concept Card and interfaces to the IGBT's.

I also need to make a 10-15V input to 15V output regulated power supply for up to 20 amps, but this can wait for now as I have an old mac power supply kluged with a 7815 dangling from my desk.

If anyone is wondering, I'm using the free version of Eagle 5.6 for layout, and the reason I did three cards is I am limited to 2.5 by 3.5 inches on the PCB because that is all that will fit through the epson printer in the CD tray.

first succesful inkjet printed PCB

I bought a kit from Full Spectrum Engineering to do PCB's direct from an Epson R280. The first two didn't turn out very well, but the third worked okay.The trick was to print it 3 times, not the 2 that the instructions say, cooking the ink each time and being Very careful when re-aligning the circuit board.

I think the double sided boards are going to be very tough.

gap, but back at it

I ran into a wall a few months ago working on the inverter. My circuit to fire the IGBT's was just not working, and I couldn't figure out why. I've since tossed my own own design, got some commercial firing cards (Concept Scale Drivers) and designed some PCB's to interface the firing card to the sanguino.

I'll post some pics when I get the PCB's etched and built.

Quote I like from Tom Ligon from the talk Poywell forum

Regarding profit, here's the really neat thing. Yes, the reason power companies want to produce power is to sell it and make a profit. The bean-counters have job security, and the engineering economists can calculate the depreciation on capital investment and life cycle costs and all that, enabling the power companies to extract a viable margin.

But that's not the real profit, and we all know it, and it is why we're all concerned about energy. The profit is that the electricity made is worth far more than it sells for. If we cannot get it by other means, we'll spend the money on solar to get it because it will be worth it.

The profit is what you can do with energy, especially abundant energy with fewer negatives involved in getting it, and what the fruits of those expenditures are. Energy, with raw materials and human talent, are the basis for our economy, and so is priceless.

The economics will shake out the most economical way to produce the power we need, but they don't set the value of the power to civilization.

sweet hybrid bus

From 1905!
link

Not sure if this is real...

Russian Women's prison..... has a beauty pagent.
http://www.webpark.ru/comment/52940



Is this real or the plot for a bad porno from 1982?

All the tools are moved

Got everything moved. Likely not organized for a month. Ack.