For the 2001 UMR Solar Car project I designed and built the hardware for the data acquisition system. We used a newer model TI DSP than from Solar Miner II, and made some other modifications to allow for expandable data sources.
The bulk of the work was done in 4 external UARTs which talked to the external peripherals: motor controller, radio modem, and driver LCD. Only two of the UARTs were used during the 2001 race, but the rest are available for future expansion.
The other external data collected by the DSP was battery voltage data from the voltage sense SPI bus, and current data from the hall effect SPI bus. Since the UARTs were SPI based as well, there were three SPI busses on board. To provide fault tolerance and noise resistance among these busses, separate buffers/tri-state drivers were used for the two external busses. This allowed only one or none of the external lines to be electrically connected inside the DSP.
