Cyclone Racing CR-28

Iowa State University's Cyclone Racing FSAE Team was founded in 1993. Each year, the team builds a new car to compete in Formula SAE events around the US. The team has around 80 active members, representing almost all majors. The team is also 100% student-led and operated. We are responsible for finding all our funding and managing our projects. Because of this, many dedicated and passionate students are on the team, and we are constantly recruiting more and more members.

Our current project is CR-28, our 28th IC car. This project is extra special as it will be our last car with an IC engine. Our team has seen

moderate success with a few top 5 and top 10 finishes over the years. We are all in this year and have overhauled our design schedule to maximize testing to go for the win this year. We expect to compete with around 120 IC FSAE teams

from schools nationwide in May.

Our team always seeks ways to improve our designs, processes, and validation. We work hard to transfer knowledge to younger students and document our progress year to year. We work to consider design judge feedback and apply it to our future designs. This creates a passionate group of students working on the car each year. This also leads to large design challenges and changes yearly to get the most out of our car.

Our main use of PCBs for CR-28 is our custom-built Telemetry system. This system allows us to collect all the data we want about our car in

real-time. This has allowed for real-time tuning, coaching, and better data logging for testing and validation. One of the unique parts of our system is the real-time wireless data transmission. The system uses LoRa WAN to broadcast our telemetry over a long range so that multiple team members can monitor the car's status simultaneously. Our system also collects and compiles data to be displayed to the driver through a dash display and shift lights. This system allows extreme customizability for each driver, event, and testing day.

CR-28 is the first Cyclone Racing car to have a custom-designed microcontroller board. Looking at the options on the market, nothing quite checked all our boxes, so we decided to build our own. The board manages all the sensors for the car, as well as logging and outputting the data. This allows for a powerful all-in-one system that is also compact and expandable. The board was designed with data integrity in mind and utilized many strategies to ensure that the data we collect, and broadcast is accurate and useful.

Cyclone Racing would greatly benefit from the support of PCBWay. As we work to improve our existing electronic systems, having easy access to PCB manufacturing would be invaluable in our development cycle. PCBWay's support would also help us in our plan to build an EV car, which will only increase our demand for PCBs and circuit design. Cyclone Racing has inspired many engineers to do great things and with PCBWay's support, it would be able to inspire even more engineers.