Description

In the summer of 2013, Elon Musk released the Hyperloop alpha paper: A 57 page primer on his vision for the future of ground transportation. In Musk’s vision, pods of people and cargo travel between cities at transonic speeds in a network of low pressure tubes, while self-driving electric cars transport goods from Hyperloop stations to their final destinations around the country. The pods travel at speeds exceeding 700 miles per hour, reducing travel times from Los Angeles to San Francisco to under 30 minutes.  Instead of pursuing this vision commercially, Musk and SpaceX have announced a student competition in which teams are invited to design, build, and test pod prototypes on a one mile track at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The hope is that this competition will foster the development of the Hyperloop technology. This competition is currently in its fourth phase, Competition IV, and has increased in complexity and ambition each year.  Michigan Hyperloop is a student organization dedicated to building a series of pods for this competition.      

Our 2017-2018 pod

Our Pod is designed around a single goal – to be the fastest pod at Competition IV. This is the only metric around which we are judged. The pod we’ve designed for the 2018 – 2019 build season utilizes a variety of innovative mechanical and electronic systems to accelerate, control and decelerate our pod throughout its run.

Techincal Details

We use a number of circuit boards to control various functions on our pod.  One such PCB is our low voltage battery management system (BMS).  This board handles save discharge and charge of our low voltage pod, responsible for powering all systems on the pod other than the electric drive motors.

Our BMS PCB CAD

However, this is just one of many boards on out pod.  Other PCBs include DC/DC buck/boost conversion boards for power management, CAN transceiver boards to interface with our pod's CAN bus, and an FPGA board for main control of the pod.  

Rapid prototyping of these PCBs is imperative for our success, since these devices contain hundreds of individual components.  Sourcing these boards locally is expensive and time prohibative, since we work on such a short schedule and limited budget.  Support from PCBWay would make it possible for us to rapidly test new designs and iterate 

Additional Information

You can find additional information about our pod and the Hyperloop competition at https://www.michiganhyperloop.com/ or our instagram, @michiganhyperloop.