During my time on working on the Horn and Lights Project, HAL, I was able to manage and help guide
new members in designing one of our application boards for Solar Car. HAL's focus is to take in data
over our software's CAN network to turn on different lights and the horn in the car. If you have
seen my writeup or video on buttonboard, you will notice that this is the direct inverse to that
board, where this time we are receiving CAN packets and converting them to a voltage output on this
board. Since the first revision of this board was already created in the previous year, it was our
job to improve on where it had failed before. Specifically, we had issues with some parts being
underspecced in how much current they should be capable of handling. Also, some of the traces on the
PCB were not well equipped to handle current outputs over 5A. To fix this, we made our goal in
redesigning the board to spec out larger parts, create wider PCB traces, and expand the board to 4
layers to make signal management cleaner.
During this revision of Headnode, I was actively working as the BPS hardware manager. After the last
revision and summer testing, I decided that this revision would be used to clean up old redundancies
and unused parts of the last board, while standardizing circuits to match our other boards. Some
changes include updating our 12V power circuit, removing unused charging logic, updating the MOSFET
buffers to the other battery pack boards, removing unused Moduleboard circuits, and updating the
circuit that drives the battery pack relays to the new power switch part, instead of the old relays.
The goal was to maintain meeting all the regulations of the old board while adding quality of life
improvements that would help future development of Headnode.
On the following page, I cover the second year of my time in Solar Car. This includes managing
hardware projects, going on my first solar car race, and being on the electrical leadership team.
During my second year, I helped manage and lead two different electrical projects, including
Headnode, which helps monitor our battery protection system, and HAL, which controls the horn and
lights in the car. I also participated in the FSGP and ASC 2021 Solar Car race as a driver! If you
want to see some video of me driving the car, this is the place to be. Finally, I worked on creating
a standardized part library for all of our current and new hardware projects to use, to help
condense the amount of parts used to save time and money from Digikey orders.