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OEM Integration Guide
Product Manuals - http://www.vescent.com/manuals/
OEM Integration Guide
Overview
The ICE Platform consists of daughter modules that are connected together through a common power
and communications bus. The daughter modules can be controlled by a master controller (
that performs power regulation, monitoring, and communications interfacing. All the circuit boards are
designed to the same template so that they can be stacked together to form a board-to-board bus
without the use of an additional backplane. An example of this stacking is shown below in
Fig. 1: ICE daughter modules stacked together.
Each PCB has common locations for mounting holes, board-to-board interconnects, I/O connectors,
and heatsinking tabs. Once the boards are stacked together, each board can be addressed and
communicated with through a serial I
2
for I
2
C details). Each daughter board can
have a specific I
2
C address set via dip switches on each circuit board and the master controller (
) can route commands directly to each board. The master controller also routes and manages the
power bus going to each board. Up to 8 I
2
C addresses can be assigned, allowing up to 8 daughter
boards to be connected to a single master controller (for a total stack of 9 circuit boards). In addition
to the I
2
C communications bus, there are global event trigger lines that are routed directly to every
circuit board. These global trigger lines form the
, which allows high-speed triggering of
pre-defined behavior through TTL without the overhead of USB or serial communications. The block
diagram in
shows how master-daughter and event system communication is routed.
