Parttime – Electronics

In order to improve the performance a lot of information needs to be gathered. Aerodynamics is an important part of the performance in a race car. In order for them to be able to tell the car how it should behave, they need to have as much data about the car as possible. That’s where the Melexis smart tire sensor comes in. It reads temperature, pressure and the nominal forces of the tire and sends those through an RF-signal.

During test drives and competitions a lot of data and information is gathered. This data needs to be easily readable with some kind of telemetry system. You’re task will be to design part of this telemetry feature. This telemetry has got two parts, One is to send the data gathered in the ECU to the cloud with a 4G module or via wifi. The other part is to get this data from the cloud and put it in a nicely readable format so that we can access the data on our laptops/phones

In order for the car to perform at the absolute limit, the team needs a lot of data. We use sensor nodes which are placed around the car where the team can connect there sensors on. And these nodes will convert the analogue voltage of the sensors to a digital which will be put on the CAN bus.
Your task would be to improve the software of these Sensor Nodes so that we can configure them via CAN, this way we can add a new sensor and reconfigure the sensor nodes without having to reconnect your laptop to the node itself all the
time.

Because we are a student team and one of our biggest priorities is to keep the driver safe, the car has a lot of safety systems. The rules regarding these safety systems tend to change with new regulations. The task is to redesign and build these safety systems.

In the car we would like to have a push to talk system that allows the driver to communicate with the team. As well as the team that can talk to the driver, this allows for crucial updates about the cars performance as well as small adjustments of the drivers driving style.
The task was to design and implement a module that the driver can use for this push to talk communication.

There is a lot of electronics that need to be designed but also build, tested and implemented. You’ll be able to
get hands on experience of the engineering life without having to know too much about the intricate idea’s behind the design.

A lot of our electronics are ultimately a way to translate our software to the real world. A good example of this is the ECU, the ECU controls the dashboard of the car. We have a GUI which is controlled by a joystick in which we can change all kinds of settings. The ECU runs on Linux, you can get a hands on experience with creating your own software environment.

This is just an example of a case, there are many more which you can work on. Together with the electronics team we can look at your interests and the remaining tasks to figure out the best and most enjoyable way you can support us.

During testing and competitions it is important to give the driver in the car as much feedback as possible. This can ensure the car to perform as optimal as possible.

We do this through buttons on the dashboard and on the steering wheel as well as a monitor screen on the dashboard. Your task would be to design and build the dashboard. This means placing the buttons and programming the ECU so that the correct buttons can start the correct functions.