Mobile Telemetry and Communications Console for Baja Racing Team

Project goal: To design, build and test a portable base station for receiving, parsing and recording telemetry data. The portable base station enables a pit crew to monitor vehicle conditions live during a race, and design engineers to analyze events leading up to a component failure.The system is housed in a ruggedized case rated for full submersion while closed. A liquid-cooled computer runs custom software that acquires data from multiple sources. A multi-threaded analysis engine analyzes the data for trends and anomalies. The data is displayed on a 23.8 inch LCD screen in a customizable format suitable for technical and nontechnical users. The graphical interface is built on wxWidgets and a custom graphics library. A removable keyboard and track pad, a 900 MHz wireless transmitter, and the core of a carrier-grade gigabit IP-based network complete the system components. The system can record over 1,000 hours of data for later review and is capable of displaying up to four hours of data at a time.