University of Kentucky Solar Car Team

The University of Kentucky Solar Car Team is an organization that designs, builds, and competes with a student-built solar car every year. Our team competes in the Formula Sun Grand Prix (a closed track race) every year and competes in the American Solar Challenge (a cross-country road race) every two years. Currently, the team is building our next car, Gato del Sol VI, for the 2018 FSGP and ASC races.

We design various PCBs for automotive embedded systems within the car. These boards perform many critical tasks within the car including battery protection, driver control, data collection, and telemetry. Each board in the car will communicate over a CAN network, to create a cohesive system in which all boards have access to all data collected. We collect data from a wide variety of sensors including thermistors, pitot tubes, and a pyranometer. This data collection is key to our race strategy and is something we hope to improve upon this year. Next year we will continue the development of our new battery management system (BMS), however as of now most of the design work for Gato del Sol VI has already been completed.

In the future we may work towards assisted and autonomous driving applications, retrofitting an old solar car as a platform for learning and development in collaboration with University of Kentucky faculty.

PCBWay’s continued support of our organization for these projects would be greatly appreciated. We are reliant on in-kind and monetary donations to operate, and any contributions are greatly appreciated.

If you are interested in following our progress find us on social media @UKSolarCar and check out our website at www.uksolarcar.com. Thank you for your time and support!