The MetaEdge Expansion Board remotely monitors and controls the operation of the high powered inverter and high voltage battery systems. The design makes use of a CM4 Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi Module. The interfaces include user interfaces and isolated (5kV) interfaces to interface to the inverter and battery systems:
The isolated 5kV interfaces include:
• Five digital inputs
• Five relay outputs
• Two CAN buses
• Two RS485 buses
The user interface includes:
• Two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
• Four USB 2.0 Type A interfaces
• One USB 2.0 Type C interface
• One SD Card slot
• One Standard HDMI interface
• One UART Debug interface
• Two status indication LEDs
• One reset button
The board is powered by 24V which has over-voltage protection and common mode & differential mode filtering. The board includes a super capacitor power backup of up to 8 minutes to allow time for the CM4 module to save captured data in RAM and perform a safe shutdown in the event of an inverter trip / power failure.
Either a Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi CM4 module can be selected according to the requirements of the operating system, such as Wifi, compute power, RAM and eMMC memory capacities.
Electron Artz was tasked to undertake the complete design from ground up. The first design worked as expected, however a revision was done to include some minor improvements that were not critical to the overall operation of the device.
Ario Metapower approached Electron Artz for design assistance with the electronic hardware for their 200kW inverter. We were tasked to review, redesign and include additional functionality into two of the three boards of the inverter control stack, and was also tasked to design two new boards for the inverter from ground up.
The MetaEdge Expansion Board was one of the two new boards that were designed from ground up.
