EtherCAT over 100Base-T1 (2023)

Chase MacDonnell

Nov 15, 2024 — 1 min read

Photo of the second revision of my Power/Network Distribution Board for the Florida Rocket Lab's Test Stand Trailer.

While evaluating different options for networking on the Florida Rocket Lab's Test Stand Trailer, I developed a series of PCBs that converted a standard 100Base-TX Ethernet signal into a 100Base-T1 Automotive Ethernet signal. This was designed to allow for single cable connection to every controller and sensor reader on the test stand. The boards used a TJA1101 100Base-T1 PHY and a DP83826E 10/100 Ethernet PHY to convert between the two Ethernet standards.

The first edition of this board actually had an issue whereby I had not properly routed the RMII signal between the two PHYs, and this resulted in a timing mismatch between the clock signals and data signals. This resulted in ethernet many packets being corrupted and dropped when the cyclical redundancy check fails. (Confirmed by checking netstat statistics on a Raspberry Pi) In the second revision I did quite a bit more research into proper RMII routing, and was able to route the boards properly and fixed this issue.

Trailer Test Stand (2024)

As part of my role as Vice President of Avionics, and more recently President, I designed and built a large portion of our Test Stand Trailer. This trailer is designed to support "Sparrow", team's liquid rocket engine designed to produced 500lbf of force. Just like our

Igniter Controls and DAQ Rev 2 (2024)

See https://chasemacdonnell.net/igniter-controls-and-daq-2022/ for more information on the original igniter system. GitHub: On a private Gitea instance, will work on transferring to my GitHub. Using all of the issues I discovered from my original igniter system, I designed a new custom controller to allow for better diagnostics and

Florida Rocket Lab ERP (2023)

GitHub: Being kept private for use by the Florida Rocket Lab. Throughout 2023 the Florida Rocket Lab at the University of Florida expanded from being a 30 person team working on a single project, to a 100+ person team with multiple separate projects happening concurrently. With this expansion came immense

Nevermore FMS (2020-Present)

GitHub: https://github.com/Nevermore-FMS/nevermore-fms (The main branch is the last functioning edition, a in-progress rewrite can be found on the "rewrite-2024" branch) The Nevermore FMS is an alternative implementation of the Field Management System used in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). I had originally started developing

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Trailer Test Stand (2024)

Igniter Controls and DAQ Rev 2 (2024)

Florida Rocket Lab ERP (2023)

Nevermore FMS (2020-Present)