McMaster Baja Racing - Dynamometer PCB

McMaster Baja Racing

Team Information

McMaster Baja Racing Team is a group of devoted undergraduate students at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON who work together to compete in the SAE Baja Series.

Competition Information

The team is tasked each year to design, build, test and race a small off-road vehicle, which must endure a variety of dynamic events and a four-hour endurance race on a track designed for severe punishment to test the abilities and durability of the vehicle.

Dynamometer PCB Information

This year, our team has been working on building a dynamometer (“Dyno”) to measure the vehicle's power output through the CVT. To do so, we have drafted a PCB that connects a variety of sensor inputs to an Arduino Mega motherboard.

The sensors on the Dyno collect information like belt speed, speeds of the primary and secondary shafts in RPM, torque (power), and displacement of the secondary shaft. In particular, this PCB allows us to visualize the shift curve as the vehicle transitions from low to high gears. An example of the data visualizer can be seen below: