Terminology 💬

Electrical sub-team acronyms and terminology

TS - Tractive System

TSMP - Tractive System Measuring Point

TSMS - Tractive System Master Switch

TSV - Tractive System Voltage

TSAL - Tractive System Active Lamp

GLV - Ground Low Voltage

GLVMS - Grounded Low Voltage Master Switch

PCB - Printed Circuit Board

A thin board typically made of an epoxy fiberglass composite. Conductive pathways are etched or "printed" onto it, connecting different components that reside on the PCB.

IC - Integrated Circuit

Sometimes called a chip or microchip, an IC is a semiconductor wafer on which thousands or millions of tiny resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors are fabricated. IC is often used as a general term for any type of amplifier, oscillator, timer, counter, logic gate, computer memory, microcontroller or microprocessor.

CAN Bus - Controller Area Network

This is a robust vehicle bus standard designed to allow microcontrollers and devices, or nodes in a network, to communicate without a host computer. CAN Bus is a message-based protocol which we often implement with a specific IC or "shield". Certain modules come with a CAN node built in.

ECU - Electronic Controller Unit

Typically refers to a microcontroller board such as the Teensy development board.

Accumulator

The accumulator is a general term that refers to the batteries of the car, as batteries are used to accumulate power. However, when we are talking about the "accumulator" we are often referring to the batteries and the housing it is in, along with everything else that is in the housing. Certain members also tend to pronounce this as the 'Acoumulaytor', please be respectful to these people.

AIR - Accumulator Isolation Relay

AMS - Accumulator Management System

The Module that monitors and interacts directly with the battery down to each cell. This includes things such as thermistors for temperature monitoring and the charging and balancing of cells.

MC - Motor Controller

Motor controllers are the 3 phase inverters that stand between the High voltage system and the motors. They are what mediate the power being sent. We often are referring to the PM100s when talking about motor controllers.

IMD - Insulation monitoring device

This device resides on the High voltage PCB board and it monitors the voltage between our High voltage system and the vehicle's ground. It ensures that the chassis is not energized with high voltage.

BRB - Big Red Buttons (Emergency shutdown switches)

They are as they say, Big Red and Buttony. With current rules, there are three BRBs. One on each side of the car and one in the cockpit. These are part of the shutdown circuit, meaning you can press them to turn off the car (the cockpit BRB only turns off TS), and pull them up to do the opposite.

HVD - High Voltage Disconnect

As long as it is safe to do so, this is what you should disconnect if the car is going haywire. It will disconnect the batteries and help prevent anything fun from happening with the batteries.