SPU Falcon Racing
2023-2024 School Year
As the Project Manager, I have been planning out tasks for the electronics team to work on. We are in the process of streamlining our data collection from sensors connected to the Raspberry Pi. We will be putting a backup camera on the car and will display the video feed on the driver interface when the car is in reverse. We are also planning to create software to test the car like a CVT tuning system, which uses two hall effect sensors.
2022-2023 School Year
My team was made up of two other Computer Science students and we put our skills to use to make a driver interface this year. We connected a Raspberry Pi 4 to a small display that we put on the dashboard. This display has a fuel gauge, speedometer, and the current gear that the car is in.
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To create the fuel gauge, I came up with the idea to use a fuel flow sensor to measure the outgoing fuel from the fuel tank since we are unable to put any sort of sensor inside of it. I wrote a script with my team that takes input from the fuel flow sensor to calculate the remaining fuel in the fuel tank. To ensure persistent reference even after the Raspberry Pi restarts, we stored the fuel data in a SQLite database, which we can later retrieve to display it on a screen for the driver. When the fuel tank is filled up, there is a reset button that can be pressed to reset the amount of fuel to full in the database.
Driver Interface
We mounted a hall effect next to the driveshaft of the car to pick up a magnetic pulse each time the driveshaft spins. The speed is calculated based on how many times the driveshaft spins in a given amount of time. The current gear displayed on the screen is picked up by a sensor attached to the shifter that sends 5 volts to a GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi. The pin that receives the signal determines the current gear on the display.
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I figured out how to run the display and the scripts for the the fuel flow sensor and hall effect on startup of the Raspberry Pi. Once the system is given power, it is ready for use.
Demo of Display
2021-2022 School Year
I worked on the electrical components of the car along with two Electrical Engineering students. This helped me to learn how to create circuits by working with electricity in this real world application.
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I have done lots of wiring on the car including wiring for the kill switches, and for the brake light. I have worked with my team to set up a connection from the car to the base station where data like the GPS location, and a live video feed are transmitted through RF radios that we have connected to each other through 2.4 GHz WiFi. We run all of these electronics through a Raspberry Pi 4. (You can see the electronics that we put together in the picture to the right)
Electronics Box
