Northeastern University Baja SAE

### DESCRIPTION ( Introduce yourserlf and your project)

Northeastern University BAJA SAE is a student-run organization that improves the technical and practical engineering knowledge of Northeastern students. This knowledge is tested through participation in the internationally-renowned Society of Automotive Engineers’ (SAE) Baja Collegiate Design Competition.

The SAE Baja Competition, which had its beginnings in 1976, requires teams to design, fabricate, assemble, and race their own prototype all-terrain vehicle. Competitions are held across the world, including three that comprise the North American series. At each competition, over 100 collegiate teams each defend their design against a panel of industry experts, host a business presentation detailing the market viability of their prototype, and race multiple trials to demonstrate the maneuverability, suspension and traction, and endurance of the proposed design.

At Northeastern Baja, our student members are responsible for all the design and fabrication work for the vehicle. Students are given the opportunity to not only develop valuable engineering knowledge in the classroom, but also to apply that knowledge in the workshop. Team members must set and meet schedules for project completion, comply with financial budgets, and establish fruitful relationships with sponsors, cultivating their business acumen. Over the past several years, the BAJA SAE team has been at the forefront of the competition, with at least one top-ten finish each year. As a result, our team has earned national recognition as a competitive force, and allowed us to form relationships with insightful students from all over the country.

A lot of that success is due to our increasing focus on data aquisition and analysis. Having quantifiable evidence to support our design decisions and continued development means that we've been able to refine our vehicle much more effectively over the past few years than ten or twenty years ago. For example, in 2017 we achieved 5th and 7th overall (out of 100 teams) in the two competitions we attended, in part due to the crucial data we gathered the year before.

As our data aquisition system has grown more extensive, though, so have our needs for custom electronics and PCBs. Our team now has its own electronics group with 7 student members who work together to design our PCBs and program our onboard microcontrollers. So far, they've put together some amazing designs, and now we're trying to get them fabricated.

The team in Illinois after our 5th place overall finish, 1st place rock crawl,

and 9th place endurance race finish

### TECHNICAL DETAILS (With project photos)

This year, we are using two onboard microcontroller systems, one is a Beaglebone Black that we've used in previous years and the other one is an ESP32 microcontroller that we're hoping to use this year and in the future.

One of the old Beaglebone Blacks we've used in previous years

One of the new ESP32 microcontrollers we're using this year

Both of these require custom breakout boards to interface with the array of sensors we place on the vehicle during testing, as trying to create the circuits on breadboards or perf boards would be too cumbersome and more prone to failure. This year we're going for our most ambitious projects to date, including a more complex main breakout board, an ultrasound gas level sensor, a heads-up display, and a prototype custom microcontroller/breakout board combo that we hope to refine and use next year.

Top view of the Beaglebone Breakout we designed last year

Side view of the same breakout board with Beaglebone attached

As such, for this year we're hoping to build 4 different boards:

5x Beaglebone Black breakout (2 or 4 layer, 7cm x 10cm)

5x ESP32 breakout (4 layer, 3cm x 6 cm)

4x Ultrasound gas sensor (2 layer, 3cm x 3cm)

3x Heads-up display (2 layer, 8cm x 5 cm)

2x Microcontroller/breakout combo prototype (4 layer, 7cm x 5 cm)

### Words to PCBWay

Hello,

My name is Amaresh Emani, a 4th year Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Northeastern University. I am also a member of my school's Baja SAE student engineering team. Every year, we compete with a one-seater off-road buggy that we design and build ourselves from scratch. Over the past few years we've been steadily increasing the amount of electronics integrated into the vehicle for data acquisition, testing, and driver information. These endeavors have helped us get to 7th and 5th in the two competitions we participated in last year, and we continue to grow the program this year.

As such, we've also found that designing our own PCBs is also easier than using off-the-shelf solutions, and so I was wondering whether PCBWays would be interested in sponsoring us. We are fully student run and receive no financial support from our university, and so we rely fully on the generosity of our sponsors each year. In return, we try to give as much exposure to our sponsors as possible by placing sponsor logos on our vehicle, website, and team apparel which are present in competitions across the U.S. as well as at various exhibition events.

I hope to hear from you guys soon.

Regards,

Amaresh Emani

Northeastern University COE '19

NUBaja Electronics Co-Lead