By Jade Cartolano / The University of Alabama
At the heart of The University of Alabama & Shelton State Community College BattChallenge team’s software crew’s work is a powerful piece of technology — Dana’s OpenECU M450, a rapid control prototyping embedded controller for the battery management system. When we first used the DANA OpenECU M450, we knew it would be central to our battery design.
Meet Dexter Gard. The University of Alabama sophomore majoring in computer science, who’s the team’s Battery Pack Software and BattScholar teams’ lead, spent time working with OpenECU M450 and learning more about its capabilities.
“M450 is crucial to our team’s operation,” Gard said. “It gathers data from all our different sensors, processes it and makes decisions that optimize performance and maintain safety. It integrates with (MathWorks’) MATLAB’s Simulink and OpenECU, allowing us to program it quickly and intuitively, and visualize how it thinks and acts.”
Working with OpenECU M450 is not just about using it for the competition — it is also about gaining firsthand experience using components of automotive technology.
Nery Carrillo and Wheeler Geddie — both Shelton State Community College students and BattChallenge team members, were excited to work on programming OpenECU M450 for the BattScholar mini module. Having access to this technology has helped students get hands-on experience working with sophisticated hardware that industry professionals are using. Our team members are learning valuable skills which they can apply to their internships and careers.
Thank you to Dana for giving us the opportunity to have OpenECU M450 as part of our toolkit. As we continue our work in the competition, we are excited to use OpenECU M450 and mentorship from Dana to drive our team to the next level.
