0 Appreciate Project

MAD Formula Team

About us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aohbAcph5n8

MAD Formula Team is a student group composed by members of careers and faculties from the spanish university Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). Every year a new single racecar is designed and manufactured improving on previous iterations and mistakes of past competitions.

The purpose of all these racecars is to participate in the Formula Student competitions, where teams all over the world compete against each other in different events.

Our PCBs

Participating in the combustion category with manual driving, while not needing to manage electric drivetrains or cameras and LIDARs for computer vision, still requires managing several electronic systems.

Using the CAN protocol to connect the different systems in the car, new modules can be added seamlessly into the existing electronics.

Relays and fuses

In charge of routing power through the entire car, this PCB uses both relays and fuses to minimize risks while doing so.

Gearshift and clutch

The gearshift and clutch are actuated through a DC motor and a servo motor respectively, with one needing an H-bridge and the other control through a PWM signal.

This PCB reads the commands from the driver through the CAN bus and actuates these 2 motors correspondingly.

Driving wheel

There is a PCB inside the driving wheel entirely dedicated to reading the input of the driver and to forward this information through the CAN bus.

Dashboard

Using LEDs and 7-segment displays, this board's purpose is to keep the driver updated on the state of the car, such as the current gear, RPMs of the engine, coolant temperature and oil pressure.

CAN node

While the our PCBs have the CAN protocol added, most sensors still need to be read as an analogue voltage. The CAN node is a small PCB devoted to reading as many of these values as possible and forwarding them through a CAN line.

BSPD and Brake Light

Both being required by the competition rules. The BSPD is designed to stop the engine in case both the brake and the throttle pedal are simultaneously stepped on beyond a certain threshold. The brake light, similar to a regular car, is designed to let anyone behind the car know that it is braking.

Due to the global shortages in electronic components, our design process has changed to share as many components as possible between the different PCBs.

While this approach makes the whole manufacturing process easier, mistakes happen in the design process regardless and we need to redo some of the boards.

Having the support of PCBWay would greatly aid us in fixing these design errors by allowing us to quickly prototype and test them. This would enable us to find these errors as soon as possible, which is vital for quickly having a functional version of these systems on the car.

These are the 2 most recent cars of our team, MFT01 and MFT02