Using arduino to get data from the H-1000XP

Projects General Guidance
1

I am part of my high school's fuel cell car program and i was looking to be able to display data from the H-1000XP fuel cell with the arduino. The fuel cell controller has 3 wires (red, blue, and black) and calls them RS-232 for computer usage. I was wondering if it would be possible to interpret the data with the arduino and if so how? The all the manual says is that
"Communication channel: RS232 serial byte format, 9600 bps, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop
bit; Little-endian format.
Message frequency: 1k Hz".

Thanks for any help,
Dillon

2

Sounds like a very cool device to experiment with. Based on the brochure at http://www.ecotesis.com/Biblioteca/Horizon/Horizon-FuelCell_H-1000xp_3_6kg_for_Eco-Marathon_2011-01.pdf it looks like the serial communication is aimed at driving a PC-type app that they provide, so you might have to reverse-engineer the messages going back and forth--or maybe the company would even send you the details if you ask.

Joe

3

Be aware that RS232 voltage levels are not directly usable as arduino inputs - you will need to convert to TTL levels. The usual suggestion for doing this is to use the MAX232 chip.

4

http://www.udomi.de/downloads/h-1000xp.pdf might be useful too, the black wire probably is ground, Red receive data and blue transmit data, looking at figure 4.17 of the document.
Since the document speaks about an connection to the PC you'll probably indeed need a Max232 or similar solution to talk to the arduino.

5

Thank you everybody, so what i was wondering and what i probably should have asked is can i follow http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoSoftwareRS232 with a few modifications?

Also i noticed you suggested the max232 while the link above uses the max323, what is the difference?

6

I guess.... there's a mistake in numbers, a Max323 exists as well, but it's an analog switch. By reading your question I guess you won't need it in your project. Loads and loads and loads of chips do handle RS-232 communications. Max(im) is manufacturer of a lot of those chips and I guess... someone may have made an error typing the number.

Edit, found the mistake, the document speaks of a Max3323 which is a chip to work with RS-232 as well.