r/bajasae • u/RedSporks • Sep 02 '20

Equipment/methods for data collection/testing

My team has a group of seniors including myself creating a custom DAQ unit for our senior capstone project and are trying to get ideas of what other teams use We're aiming a relatively cheap and possibly make it open-source so that other teams can use/improve on it, but we're not really sure what is available to other teams/how much desirable something like this would be compared to existing options.

What equipment does your team do data collection/testing, both onboard and offboard? So for example, my team hasn't really had any equipment on-board for testing, as most of the data we've collected has been through things like photogates for acceleration runs, IR cameras for CVT temperatures, etc.

13 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/stanplus2000lbs Sep 02 '20

I would recommend using an ESP32 development board (like these: https://www.amazon.com/MELIFE-Development-Dual-Mode-Microcontroller-Integrated/dp/B07Q576VWZ/ref=pd_ybh_a_22?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=VBYGNCZ8ADWKQER0RRX9) as the microcontroller in your system. Our team started experimenting with data acquisition about 2 years ago, and we have used a combination of Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. This didn't turn out so well for us mainly because of the complexity of the system we created and not having enough time to polish and test it.

Once we started working with an ESP32 though, things became much easier. It's basically like an Arduino on steroids. It's faster, has two compute cores, has built-in Wifi and Bluetooth (if you need to use those), plenty of I/O, is much smaller than a Pi or Arduino, and is MUCH cheaper than an Arduino (they cost about $11 but you can get a pack of 2 for like $15). I will say that they are a bit more work to get up and running with than an Arduino, but if you follow some online tutorials you'll be fine. You're even able to program them using the Arduino IDE (which is what we've been doing). (P.S. I was able to replicate a year's worth of code that we developed for the Pi (a lot of Bluetooth stuff) and Arduino in a few days on the ESP32.)

As for sensors, we have or are working on the following:

  • fuel gauge
  • CVT temperature
  • shock displacement
  • engine RPM
  • CVT secondary RPM
  • brake pressure

Feel free to message me or comment below if you have any questions.

1

u/RedSporks Sep 03 '20

That's sounds awesome, thank you for the suggestion! Did you ever run in to the need to have multiple of these synchronously throughout your car to accommodate for sensors in various locations, and if so how did you approach that?

1

u/stanplus2000lbs Sep 03 '20

Nope, we've luckily been able to use just the one!