Hello there,
I’m an EE student with a project team developing a solar-powered car for competition. EMI from our in-vehicle radio, and even radio from outside the vehicle, has been causing our vehicle to accelerate full-throttle. We’re replacing our analog accelerometer with a digital encoder in hopes that will be enough to rid or mitigate the radio interference, but this has led me to another question.
There is little to no shielding on any of the boards. Most of the boards are placed in a box sitting on the dash of our vehicle, which wasn’t designed to be a shield. Few wires have any shielding on them, and as far as I understand, braided shielding does little for high frequency radiation.
My question is: At what environments would you need shielding for your electronics? Where PCB design and filters aren’t enough to protect against EMI? Would an on-the-road environment with the only prominent external EMI source being a nearby radio be enough to need shielding? And if you did need shielding, is it enough to simply shield one part of a system, like a sensor or PCB, a component and its wires, or does the entire system need to be shielded?
I think about desktop computer cases; as far as I’ve read, their cases have too many openings to act properly as a faraday cage, so they’re essentially bare boards with no shielding, yet they seem to handle EMI well without it. But they’re probably not in environments that would have a lot of strong EMI sources
Additionally, any recommendations on intro books to EMI and EMI protection/design tips if they exist would be greatly appreciated!
I’m an EE student with a project team developing a solar-powered car for competition. EMI from our in-vehicle radio, and even radio from outside the vehicle, has been causing our vehicle to accelerate full-throttle. We’re replacing our analog accelerometer with a digital encoder in hopes that will be enough to rid or mitigate the radio interference, but this has led me to another question.
There is little to no shielding on any of the boards. Most of the boards are placed in a box sitting on the dash of our vehicle, which wasn’t designed to be a shield. Few wires have any shielding on them, and as far as I understand, braided shielding does little for high frequency radiation.
My question is: At what environments would you need shielding for your electronics? Where PCB design and filters aren’t enough to protect against EMI? Would an on-the-road environment with the only prominent external EMI source being a nearby radio be enough to need shielding? And if you did need shielding, is it enough to simply shield one part of a system, like a sensor or PCB, a component and its wires, or does the entire system need to be shielded?
I think about desktop computer cases; as far as I’ve read, their cases have too many openings to act properly as a faraday cage, so they’re essentially bare boards with no shielding, yet they seem to handle EMI well without it. But they’re probably not in environments that would have a lot of strong EMI sources
Additionally, any recommendations on intro books to EMI and EMI protection/design tips if they exist would be greatly appreciated!