We are TU Wien Racing, the Formula Student Team from the Technical University of Vienna. Every year we build an electric race car to compete against other student teams from all over the world. We are currently working on our new car, the EDGE17 for the coming season of Formula Student. In this Article we would love to show you our brand new brake temperature PCB, which we are implementing this season, to measure and analyse how the brakes behave in a race on our car.
What does the Brake Temp Board do?
The new board is mounted on the upright of all 4 wheels and enables us to read 3 different sensors. Firstly, we have an infrared sensor, so that we can measure the temperature of all our brake discs, which is read via I2C. Secondly, an IMU (Inertia Measurement Unit) can be found on the PCB. With that component we can track the motion and orientation of all 4 points of the car that should have traction with the ground. Last but not least, we also incorporated a ride height sensor, which we can either read out with an analog signal or using the CAN-Bus. All the data of these sensors gets read by an STM microcontroller and then sent to the rest of the car via CAN. All this new data helps us further optimize our car.
Further design choices
When designing the PCB we made sure to place decoupling capacitors close to their respective pins, to ensure a steady and clean power delivery to the ICs. Furthermore, via fencing was used to shield the PCB from unwanted high frequency signals and therefore improve our signal integrity. Since ESD is also a problem that needs to be considered, TVS & ESD diodes were placed to ensure the safety of our parts. The CAN lines are routed as a differential pair to ensure robust communication.
We are very grateful to have AISLER as a sponsor, since they enable us to quickly build prototypes and optimize them. The quality of the PCBs has always been perfect and we hope to create even more great boards in the future.
Warm regards and a big thank you!