0 Appreciate Project

Carnegie Mellon Racing FSAE

We are the Carnegie Mellon University Formula SAE Team. We bring together the brightest engineers at Carnegie Mellon University to design and build a fully electric Formula style race car to compete with other university FSAE teams across North America.

This summer, we first competed at the Formula Hybrid + Electric competition. At this competition, we won every static and dynamic event in the electric category and were awarded 1st Place Electric Vehicle Overall. Following that, we competed at FSAE Michigan where we came 2nd in Engineering Design, 2nd in Business Presentation, 2nd in Efficiency, and 5th Overall in the EV Class.

We are currently designing and constructing our new 2023 car. We’re looking to make some key technical improvements such as a redesign for simplicity and reliability of our low-voltage control and battery management systems that include over 20 custom PCBs.

Our GLV system is modeled off an automotive ECU distributed embedded system. What this means is that we have 8 custom boards that handle various functions on the car. For example, one of the boards is responsible for the driver interface and pedal sensors, another board handles the vehicle’s dynamics, another board handles the cooling of the powertrain, and another board handles the safety circuitry. An image of our controls and telemetry board is below.

Our high voltage systems consist of a custom built 600V cylindrical cell battery pack with a custom battery management system. Our battery management consists of 8 boards each of which manages the voltage, temperature, and state of cell balancing of 90 cells for a total of 720 cells. One of the boards is shown below. We also have a custom high voltage backplane which provides mounting for various electro-mechanical devices and provides connections between some of our high voltage PCBs.