Just like last years, our electronics department is supported by NXP Semiconductors. For the self-designed printed circuit boards we use several components which are supplied by NXP. The most important one is probably the LPC1769 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller which contains all software. We use this microprocessor on our electronic control unit to control the motor controllers, monitor the safety systems and for the data-acquisition. The printed circuit boards in the dashboard and the steering wheel which are used for the interface with the driver also contain this microprocessor. Communication between the microprocessors is done through the CAN-bus. Therefore we use TJA1051T/3 CAN Transceivers.

Our biggest self-designed printed circuit board, the mainboard of the electronic control unit, can be assembled by NXP. This saves us a lot of money and time so we can focus ourselves 100% on designing and assembling the other printed circuit boards. Last week we received our assembled mainboard from NXP, and as can be seen on the picture everything is attached perfectly straight. We could never have reached this result by hand, and therefore we would like to thank NXP for their help!

The past week our team has produced our insert for the suspension geometry. More than half of the car is going to be monitored by using strain gages at the inserts. With these strain gages, we can read all the forces in our suspension. This allows us to improve our car set-up, understand our tyres better and further improve our design for next year’s car.

The strain gages were sponsored by and applied to our inserts at NLR, one of our key sponsors. We, again, want to thank NLR for this opportunity and the help and knowledge they supply. To the right you can see one of our inserts, complete with strain gauges.