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#Formula SAE Dashboard Project

Team: Formula Win

Team Members: Keith Nygaard, Grant Spencer, Colin Royston, Kendall Samuel, Corbin Smith

##Project Overview and Executive Summary

The project is to design and build a working dashboard system for the Colorado School of Mines FSAE team that displays certain vital vehicle parameters for use in debugging and in a racing environment. The Formula SAE competition car has never had any type of information display system for the driver to utilize during a race, which has posed problems during competition in previous years. Units similar to the one that the club requested can be found in all modern commercially available vehicles as well as in almost every tier of racing vehicle. However, our system is uniquely designed to fit the FSAE vehicle due to budget and spatial constraints. Originally, we had anticipated making a dashboard similar in appearance to that in a consumer-oriented car, but the lack of viewable space behind and around the steering wheel forced us to consider less conventional options. Based on the design constraints, we decided to mount our system directly on the steering wheel of the car so that the unit is accessible and visible at all times during operation with a quick glance from the driver. Evaluation of the operating environment and driver preference revealed that a seven inch screen mounted with a low profile housing unit directly on the wheel will allow enough clearance for the driver to properly operate the vehicle without any interference from the display. Additionally, concerns about power consumption from our unit were analyzed and found to be of minimal concern, as the power draw from the entirety of the display system is less than 16 W at peak operating conditions, a relatively low draw compared to the rest of the vehicle’s systems. Even so, we have implemented a cut-off in our design so that if the power draw from the information system were to become an issue, all power could be directed away from it and directed to the vital car systems, We also found that signal interference and interpretation must be addressed by the program development side of our design. While none of the signals being output from the engine control unit (ECU) are particularly susceptible to large amounts of noise (as the ECU itself actively controls this problem), our micro-controller unit has to interpret data inputs at a specific rate in order to provide quality data at any given operational state. The evaluation performed concludes that our system should be capable of meeting the client’s needs and will be able to perform above the expectations set for it.

The software side of the project entails the integration of the CAN bus network on the car, the processing of data (or storing of data), as well as the best way to display data to the driver. This Readme explains the ideas behind different segments of the code, proper use of different sections of code, and the use of different tools that are provided regarding updating the micro-controller and testing the micro-controller.