I'm going to be working on a race car! Ok, now that you've examined the picture more closely you will no doubt have noticed that this is no monstros beast. It is in fact a scaled down version of a Formula One race car. Kind of like how I'm a scaled down version of a real life human. However, make no connection between my lack of athleticism and the prowess of this little furball. It sports a YZF 600cc motorcycle engine and transmission, will weigh about 450 lbs, and run zero to sixty in under 3 seconds. The car will be designed and manufactured by the Mechanical Engineering department here on campus.
So you must be wondering where me the somewhat mechanically inept Telecommunications student falls in here. I will be part of a two person (she would never let me get away with 'two man') team that provides the DAQ[?] system. This means that we'll be building a system that monitors things like wheel speed, suspension movement, tire temperature, etc... Oh and you should be impressed... we're going to do that wirelessly! Keep reading for a technical overview.
Right now the plan is to use a CompactRIO system from National Instruments (who has been very generous in offering two of these $3k systems for free). This system will be mounted under the drivers seat, and connected to a network of sensors througout the car. Some of these sensors will be plain old dumb linear pots, and others will be taken from the engine controller. Here's the current list of planned measurements
After the on car system has collected this data, we'll use a Bluetooth wireless connection to transfer the data back to a laptop for analysis. Of course, I know what you're thinking; bluetooth is meant for very short range, low data rate use. And indeed you are correct. The data we are collecting here will max out at about 66Kb/s which is far under the 1.5 Mb/s. When the car is out of range of the laptop, which might be most of the time, the on-car system will buffer the data. After a connection is re-established the backlogged data will be sent to the laptop.
The laptop will be equiped with a .Net platform; of course this means it could be a handheld too! National Instruments has released some fairly nifty chart, graph, knob, and display GUI elements for .Net. The software that we create to collect the data, and provide user analysis will use these elements for easy interpretation. Overall we expect this system to be a single click system that provides quick feed back to the engineers on the car's performance.
This will serve as my senior project for my Undergraduate degree. I'll be working on this, and the rediculous amount of documentation and class 'overhead' for the next 9 months. I do hope to make a few updates during that time. But if I disapear. Well... its because I'm out "test driving" the equipment.
Travis flying into LAX today for #AdobeMax through Wednesday.
Reston, Virginia
