DiffDriver Released!
When Mike at Innovative Tuning reached out about this idea, the world was very much gripped by a pandemic, I was in a different state, my daughter was crawling, and my son wasn't even born. Since then, we made several prototypes that Mike would try on his car between my time for development and the downtime on his own car. Here we are, one home renovation, one extra son, three board revisions, countless labeling revisions later.. and it's a released product!
(By the way, this is an example of what my house looked like as I worked on this - who knew there could be so many layers of floor in one bathroom?)
The initial feedback has had a clear question - isn't this just a fancy solid state relay? I'll let you in on a little secret. Two years ago, the initial prototype *was* a fancy solid state relay:
The initial concept had flying leads, and a relatively simple approach to drive the center differential. The only problem? It didn't work - the need to integrate all of the necessary control (an override switch, a disable signal to tie to E-Brake, etc.) showed that we needed actual logic. We also added indication so that it was more clear when the unit was powered and actually receiving a signal. The flying leads also proved problematic, so we added a connector. Because we wanted this to be rugged for *actual* race cars, we went with a DT-style connector from Amphenol.
Several added components later, an entirely custom case design to accommodate the connector and LEDs, and plenty of potting epoxy later, we had the next iteration:
This version went on Mike's car, and actually went through a GLTC race a Circuit of The Americas. The unit in the background has additional blue wires coming off because I did thermal testing on it. From a thermal perspective, the low Rds FET doing the work performed better than expected, however it needed a few more components to not ring while switching high current.
Which brings us to the dual-branded module of today! The case was revised to have two mounting holes rather than just one, and it was made from billet aluminum and laser engraved. Not pictured here is also a functional tester to drive each module before it gets potted in epoxy to ensure no one gets a dud. For bonus points, we also did some packaging exercises with custom cut foam to accommodate the module and extra bits pictured.
All in all, it's been a journey, but I'm really happy to see this thing go out in the world. It'll probably never make up for the time I put in to it or the cost spent on prototypes, but it's a huge step forward for Haze Engineering that I'm excited to see in customer's hands.