A DISTRIBUTED SENSOR NETWORK FOR AN OFF-ROAD RACING VEHICLE

Abstract

The University of Arizona Baja Racing Team competes annually in an intense off-road racing competition. This year’s car features a distributed sensor network capable of displaying useful data to the driver, the benefits and technical aspects of which are examined by this paper. Based on the ATmega2560 chip, the system is USB programmable, features hot-swappable batteries, and includes SMD components. Each sensor is custom designed, functions as an I2C slave, and contains its own ATtiny85 microcontroller allowing all the sensors to be addressable and enables them to be wired in parallel. The system also includes interrupts for almost every single sensor, which allows for more accurate data collection and guarantees that no important data will be missed. A custom-made board was created to connect these sensors and serve as a microcontroller data logger based on an Arduino reference design.