This contains my projects for Longhorn Racing Electric, the Formula SAE Electric team for the University of Texas at Austin.
Formula SAE, or Formula Student, is the world's largest student design competition where students build a formula style racecar and compete in various events around the world. We compete in the Electric division at Formula SAE Lincoln, held each June in Lincoln, Nebraska. At competition, the car is judged in static and dynamic events. The static events are design, cost and sales presentations. The car must then pass a technical inspection to ensure safety, before competing in the dynamic events acceleration, figure 8, autocross and endurance.
I am a member of the Electronics subteam for Longhorn Racing Electric. In the past I have focused mainly on control systems, and this year I am the Tractive System lead, in charge of the high voltage system of the car. In 2017 I designed a sensor board that read data from a sensor and communicated over I2C to sned the data to a controller board. I designed two boards for the 2018 car, the Dashboard and the DC/DC Converter Board. The Dashboard is the main front controller and is the driver's main interface with the car. The DC/DC Converter board interfaces with a Vicor DC/DC converter brick to provide 12V power to our control system from the 300V battery. I have also worked on assembly our battery pack, which in 2018 consisted of 720 18650 battery cells in a 10p72s configuration. I worked on busbar construction, spot welding nickel strips in the busbars to the cells, assembly and testing of the custom battery management system (BMS), and battery control unit construction, which included the BMS master, current sensors, contactors and high voltage wiring.
In addition to my hardware work, I have written software to control various parts of our control system. I wrote drivers for the LCD screen and LEDs on the dashboard and code to interface with those drivers to display various information to the driver based on CAN messages received from the BMS master and Read CPU. I also wrote code to take digital pedal readings from the ADC on the dashboard, send them over CAN to the Rear CPU, run various checks to determine if the values are valid, and convert the values to a format that is used by the inverter controller.