AN IMPROVED TELEMETRY SYSTEM FOR MONITORING AN OFF-ROAD RACECAR

Abstract

The University of Arizona Baja Racing Team competes annually in a grueling off-road racing competition designed to test the durability of each team’s vehicle. For the last several years, we have been developing a custom telemetry system to monitor and analyze the performance of the vehicle in order to provide live diagnostics to the pit crew and driver, as well as to inform future designs. This year, we have redesigned the core of the system to be more modular and use more COTS parts in order to allow easier upgrade and repair, and have upgraded many existing sensors, added sensors to monitor driver vitals, improved the driver’s display, and embedded USB hubs in our power distribution boards to allow programming of all microcontrollers on the vehicle over a single USB interface. These changes will make future development easier and will produce far more data than we have had in previous generations.