NMSU Mini Baja Electronics System

### DESCRIPTION ( Introduce yourserlf and your project)

I'm Justin Squire, a member of New Mexico State University SAE Baja team. I am pursuing a masters degree in electrical engineering, and work on a team with mainly engineering students. These projects are great because of the learning experiences they provide, and the real-world application of engineering principles. 

This project involves designing, building, and competing a single-seater off-road vehicle and is associated with engineering colleges. Each year, we build a vehicle and compete against hundreds of other universities in the SAE Baja competition. As part of this project, data acquisition is also highly useful in refining designs and analyzing performance. The project proposed for sponsorship is a prototype board for the data acquisition system, using an AVT ATXMEGA chip as the basis. We plan to use this board to evaluate the possibilities of integrating accelerometers, data logging, and strain gages into an in-vehicle data logging system. Some previous attempts at data logging systems used an off the shelf Arduino Pro-Mini as the backbone, but this was overly simple and was not as appealing to the judges of the competition. We hope to improve our scores and our knowledge of the vehicle through application of this new prototype system. 

### TECHNICAL DETAILS (With project photos)

Previous project pictures show the data acquisition system that was made with an Arduino Pro-Mini. It's features included a heads up display to the driver, and also the monitoring and logging of GPS coordinates, engine RPM, lap count, battery level, engine temperature, vehicle speed, and several others. 

We hope to expand on this functionality with the AVR ATXMEGA chip and begin with the production of this custom designed PCB for evaluation. 

### Words to PCBWay

Thank you for your generous support of so many projects, especially educational endeavors. This will greatly help our team and our limited budget.