The Story

The Formula SAE (FSAE) Electric competitions challenge teams of university undergraduate and graduate students to conceive, design, fabricate, develop and compete with small, formula style vehicles. The competition is an engineering education competition that requires performance demonstration of vehicles in a series of events, both off track and on track against the clock. Each competition gives teams the chance to demonstrate their creativity and engineering skills in comparison to teams from other universities around the world.

The concept is simple: get four rolling wheels, a chassis, and drop a power plant in there. But the reality is brutal. Over a hundred pages of rules and regulations – that keep us safe – but also make the reality of design quite a bit more complicated than a typical garage project. On top of that, many parts are custom and therefore, don’t have technical support. There’s also the huge challenge of interdisciplinary integration. Getting a mechanical system to work nicely with the electrical and all of that to work nicely with the computers is a bit harder than just designing an upright or battery pack.

Formula U Racing is my student organized FSAE club. We’re mostly degenerates, but on the weekends we’re hard working, motivated engineers. Although I often find myself frustrated with other team members, I love this group of hoonigans.

It was one of my hardest and most rewareding challenges I’ve ever had in my undergraduate career.

My part

First and Second Season, Suspension Team

My first two years on the team, I was a member of the suspension team. We designed any of the passively dynamic parts of the vehicle. Everything from uprights, to steering colums, to bell canks and sway bars.

I learned a lot about vehicle dynamics and good CAD practices along with hands on skills for manufacturing. We did not race either of these seasons.

Third Season, Tractive Team

Tractive is in charge of anything high voltage on the car. This includes power plant (motor) selection, motor inverter, battery pack (accumulator), and all the safety and circuits needed for the high voltage system. I joined the tractive team because no one was on it and death by electrocution can’t be that bad … right?

The first semester, I worked purely on designing the battery segments, these are smaller battery packs that are then wired in series to reach total accumulator voltage. The design considerations were for most efficient voltage to current ratio for our system, segment cooling, and maintainability/replacement of individual cells. Towareds the end, I also designed our maintanence plugs, which are custom, high voltage, tooless, positive locking busbars.

Second semester rolled around and the team lead quit, he was the only other one on the team, so I guess that makes me in charge? I took the roll of team lead and finished the design of the Tractive System Active Lights (TSAL) which is a hardware logic board that indicates when high voltage is leaving the accumulator and the system is ready (live).

I also worked on design of the Braking System Plausibility Device (BSPD).

We did not race this year either, but it’s the closest we’ve ever been. A few flaws were we did not start assembly of the accumulator until a month before competition, which led to a huge backlog of labor and because of this, none of our controls systems had been run through integration testing before competition. This led to many small problems that should have been worked out months before we got to competition. But now we know and are ready for next season. Another huge problem we couldn’t really account for was the ergonomics team literally vanished second semester, they were in charge of the steering column, pedal box, and driver cockpit. None of which, were finished before comp.

Fourth Year, Controls Team

This is my last and final year on the team. I somehow ended up as the controls team lead, we handle all the low voltage systems on the car including communications and safety features. We also implement all the architecture for actively dynamic systems on the car using microprocessors, microcontrollers, and computers. This encompasses UI/UX as well.

Current projects underway include:

• Torque vectoring for dual motors next year. This will help us in handling and with traction control. The idea is simple but implentation is tricky. We are currently exploring RTK GPS and absolute dead-reckoning
• Heads Up Display (HUD) for driver interface as well as real time, AR best line of path plotting (imagine the tutorial levels in Forza where there’s an line painted over the course showing you where to go and how fast to go)
• New pedal box design including mechanical and regenerative braking
• Active aerodynmaics package using pitot tube if the RTK GPS doesn’t work out
• RTOS for vehicle tuning (currently using FreeRTOS but looking for Green Hills sponsorship, so if you work for Green Hills, please give us free software)
• Wireless comms (WiFi) for real time telemetry feedback and data visualization

The last major task we successfully completed was setting the EEPROM on the motor controller and to properly read commands from the CAN bus.