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General discussion / Sourcing EOL IC's on TaoBao?
Been a while since posting the forums. For the past two years I've been involved with ForZe Delft, a completely non-profit team of strictly students that have been building and racing Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered race cars for the last 6 years. We're currently working on the 6th car, that will use a 100kW fuel cell system, 200kW peak motor power, and weigh in at about 800kgs. Our previous cars were a lot smaller so it has ben quite the challenge! If you want to read some more there's some more info on the website http://http://www.forze-delft.nl/. Also, I'll be happy to answer any questions about the project.
As nearly all systems are self built, the Buspirate in particular has been a huge help on several occasions. My own BusPirate has been 'confiscated' by the team so I'll be in the market for a new one soon ;)
Anyway we have a bit of a problem on our hands at the moment. To deal with the slow response of the fuel cell, we use a supercapacitor accumulator (160x 2300F, about 600V) which has to be monitored. The monitoring circuitry has been based on the LTC6804 IC. Sadly there seem to be some problems with this IC running on higher temperatures (not a problem for us) so it has been discontinued by LT. Waiting on the new revision (~July) is not really an option. Now we happen to be a little low on stock with this IC and it's sold out at all normal outlets. I did find a couple of ads on TaoBao/Tmall, but not sure if that's really trustworthy. Does anyone here have any experience with this sort of thing? Or perhaps a different way to acquire said IC's?
Thanks