Requirements
Passthrough 18 V - 55 V (6S lower voltage to 12S upper voltage )
Measure current through hall effect current sensing (without a shunt resistor to minimize losses)
Measures voltage with an ADC
I2C or UART interface
Preference toward I2C, but just pick one of them
XT60 connector for input power and output power
Maximum current passthrough requirements
Max pulsed current 200 A
Max continuous current 75 A
Refer to Nathan’s current power module, photos in discord, for a reference to what this board will be replacing.
Implementation Ideas
“High” voltage & current passthrough should be done with an XT60 connector.
Current measuring can be implemented with a smaller current transformer to be mounted on the PCB
A simple ADC integrated (presumably 2 channel ADC) and possibly voltage divider circuit can be used to measure both current and voltage
This ADC should support I2C and SPI and may be fitted with a signal buffer IC
Fairly standard to be able to find an ADC that can operate at 3.3V
A single “low voltage connector” should be used
This would be some relatively fine pitch connector
Some standard molex thing
Four conductors on this connector
GND (this will be signal ground, but should be presumed as the same potential and non-isolated from the “high voltage passthrough gnd”
5V or 12 V input power (possibly a range that supports each of these and maybe more)
I2C or UART data lines (2 conductors for each of these protocols.
Powering the ADC
The ADC and buffer (if a buffer is included, just an idea) will ideally consume very miniscule current, on the order of less than 200mA which makes a simple LDO (low dropout regulator) viable
This LDO will take the low voltage input power and use that to power the ADC chip.
LDO has lower efficiency than a buck, but will save board space and will be more convenient to implment.
Because of the negligible total power requirements for the board a low efficiency doesnt matter as much