Formula Student Life

I was a part of Team Ojas for almost 3 years of my undergrad life. We built open wheeled electric racing vehicles. I was the Electrical Lead (ESO) on the team and built a handful of the critical systems on the car. This is a brief description of some of these projects I worked on.

Data Acquisition and Interlock Unit

I built a Data Acquisition system to log the rear wheel speeds, driver pedal input and the battery pack current. It would also generate an interlock fault when one of the 2 parallel paths on the battery pack would draw more current than the other. The system was based on an Atmel Atmega328. The idea was to build an easy and cheap solution for acquiring data at the cost of efficiency, complexity.

Battery Management System

In a car with 160 highly reactive Lithium Polymer Cells. It was important to monitor the cell constantly and shut down the car in case of problems. I built a distributed Battery Management System using LTC6804 cell monitoring IC. This was a critical system since High Voltage and Low Voltage interacted with each other in this system. We used Daisy Chained Transformer based communication to maintain isolation and enable modularity in the system.
Here are the Firmware Files I wrote for this system and the Board Designs

Conceptualize the Electrical System

This was not a really well defined project, It was just a combination of all the electrical systems and leading a great set of engineers to build the battery pack, power distribution system, Safety interlock circuits and the pedal system ECU. All of this led to a great car we made and competed in Formula Student Competitions in India and Italy.