Summary
As the Electrical Director on my university’s Formula SAE Electric team, I lead a team of 15 electrical engineering students and oversee the technical development of a fully custom low voltage and high-voltage battery management electrical architecture.
Since coming into the role in March 2024, I have been developing a new electrical system architecture in alignment with the team’s transition to a quad motor drive-train and 600 Volt battery pack. The goals of this development is to intelligently integrate new and existing systems together in a way that increases capabilities while decreasing cost, weight, and manufacturing time.
As a result of these efforts, many improvements have been made to the design of the entire electrical system compared to the previous generation vehicle.
- 36% lower average board-to-wire harness connector size
- Smaller PCB sizes resulting in smaller mechanical enclosures and costs
- 28% lower number of wires in wire-harness
- Reduced wire harness weight
- Reduced number of potential failure points
- Reduced firmware team contention for board access
- Split systems across different boards to more accurately mirror splits in firmware teams
- Better system modularity
- CAN bus functionality no longer dependent on having all boards connected due to move away from linear daisy-chained network
High-Level block diagram showing wire harnessing architecture between different systems
Old CAN bus architecture (left) vs. New CAN bus architecture (right)
CAD for the vehicle is intended to be completed by December 2024, and assembly, integration, and testing will continue from January 2025 to the Formula SAE Electric Michigan competition in June 2025.