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Data Acquisition | Sun Devil Motorsports - Formula SAE

About Sun Devil Motorsports

Sun Devil Motorsports is Arizona State University’s competing team for the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Collegiate Design Series Formula SAE Competition. Competing since 1992, we consist of students of various engineering and business backgrounds, boasting the largest roster of any ASU engineering team. Operating like a small scale business, we design and manufacture a fully operational race-car in-house to compete in the annual competition each year. In doing so, we provide students of all disciplines the opportunity to apply their classroom knowledge in a real-world application, allowing them to demonstrate their engineering skills.

The Competition

Formula SAE is a competition hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers, that invites universities from across the world to design, build, and compete with a race-car against each other. Each team’s race-car is judged in all aspects, including engineering design and cost, as well as performance trials such as acceleration, skidpad, and autocross, and a high performance endurance event.

Most recently at the 2023 Formula SAE IC Competition, we took part in all of the dynamic events for the first time since 2017, and in addition, matched our best performing car from 2019. This season, we hope to improve our performance through developing the most technically advanced race-car the team has ever produced.

Data Acquisition

Our team members are organized into different sub-teams, each focusing on a specific subsystem of the car.

The Data Acquisition (DAQ) sub-team plays a critical role in validating the car’s design and extracting as much performance as we can out of it. We are responsible for all of the electronics in the car tasked with collecting data and integrating the necessary sensors and wiring. This involves designing custom printed circuit boards, all of them connected to each other via a CAN bus and each fulfilling a specific role, such as logging data, transmitting telemetry, or reading sensor data into the system. In doing so, we provide the rest of the team with the capability to make data-driven conclusions and improve their subsystem designs for years to come.

Every year we design new PCBs, either to revise old designs or to add new capabilities to the car. Integrating 15 PCBs into the car this year, this season represents a massive leap in the sub-team’s knowledge and responsibilities. The three boards below demonstrate our knowledge leap and passion for developing an exceptional car we can be proud of.

Lap Timing

In the past, we have relied on using stopwatches to manually time our car during testing. Although functional, we found this approach to be imprecise and difficult to integrate with our logged data. To solve this problem, we have designed an automated lap timing system, consisting of two boards - a beacon and a receiver.

The lap beacon, which is placed trackside, emits one of four possible codes based on the state of the switches. With multiple beacons, this allows for measuring up to three different split times. Since the beacon is battery-operated, care was taken to make this PCB as power-efficient as possible. To this end, we the beacon and broadcasts the lap or split time information to the CAN bus using a Teensy 4.0 and a SN65HVD230 CAN transceiver.

With this system, we hope to improve the precision of our timings during testing and better evaluate changes and optimizations to the car.

Telemetry

Our telemetry board is hooked up to the car’s CAN bus, and wirelessly transmits pertinent data to the trackside station, allowing our trackside crew to receive data while the car is running. It uses a NRF24L01 radio to transmit telemetry, a Teensy 4.1 for data processing, and a SN65HVD230 CAN transceiver to interface with the CAN bus. This will enable us to monitor engine vitals as well as gain instant feedback of the car’s performance, ensuring the safe operation of the car and providing quick feedback to both vehicle tuners and the driver.

Wheel Board

The wheel board represents one of the most technically advanced and important PCBs on the car this year. Located inside of each wheel, this 4-layer board includes a MLX90614 infrared temperature sensor pointed at the brake rotor, and a pinout for a hall effect sensor to measure wheel speed. A STM32F405 microcontroller processes the information from these sensors, and broadcasts it to the CAN bus with a SN65HVD230 CAN transceiver. An onboard EEPROM chip is included to allow each board to be configured to use a different CAN ID while running identical firmware. To fit inside of the wheel assembly, this PCB is one of our smallest designs, yet one of the most capable on the car this year.

How PCBWay can help Sun Devil Motorsports

To support our ambitious goals, we have designed more PCBs this season alone than we have in the past. With a sponsorship from PCBWay, we will be able to manufacture, assemble, and test our PCBs in the real world, giving our team members invaluable real world experience in all aspects of the PCB design process.

We are looking forward to competing again in May this year, and PCBWay’s support will allow us to show off our exceptional work at competition.