Development of a data acquisition system for the UoMR team

Abstract

In the past couple of years, the University of Malta Racing (UOMR) team have been attempting to design and develop an on-board data acquisition (DAQ) system to acquire and log data from several systems on-board the race car. To date some progress has been made but a complete working system is still not available. This project aims to develop an operational data bus capable of handling all the required transfer of data, together with a standalone DAQ system to capture real-time information in a real-time efficient manner. The on-board data bus needs to be robust and flexible such that it ensures a good performance in terms of noise immunity and should allow for easy reconfiguration by fellow team members. This would warrant future use and scalability. Throughout this project the DAQ system was developed and a controller area network (CAN) was set up to connect all boards of the DAQ system and all boards on-board the formula style racing car. The components of the DAQ system were all tested, and the correct functionality of the CAN network was verified. Detailed documentation about the implementation of the complete DAQ system, its CAN setup and its CAN data configurations are provided as a user handbook to encourage future UOMR team members to further develop this DAQ system by, incorporating any additional sensors, nodes and to modify the performance of the controller area network.