Alset Solar Cybersedan

Florida Atlantic University · Advanced Experimental Vehicles · 2024

View from inside the solar car on the speedway. A driver's hand rests on the steering wheel; the dashboard screen shows a live track camera, lap times, a 42 percent state-of-charge gauge, pack voltage and current, and per-cell battery statistics. — Everything on that screen is the team's own software.

The Florida Atlantic Solar Owls built a four-passenger solar car and took it to the 31st annual Solar Car Challenge at Texas Motor Speedway — four days of racing on a mile-and-a-half oval, after three days of scrutineering. It finished second in the Cruiser Division, and took the Lockheed Martin Award for engineering excellence and the Renda Carter Award for the team video and scrapbook. It was the first car from a Florida high school or university to compete in that division.

Everything the driver sees in the photograph above is the team's own software: a Tesla-style dashboard running on a touchscreen in the car, showing live speed, battery management data, lap timing, and three camera feeds. The same interface was reachable from anywhere in the world over a VPN, so the pit crew and everyone back home watched the same telemetry the driver did.

What I worked on

I was the Unix and documentation side of the coding subteam. That meant the machine underneath the dashboard: Arch Linux ARM on a Raspberry Pi 5, a Hyprland compositor session for the touchscreen, gpsd and USB serial plumbing for the GPS and the Thunderstruck BMS, and a WireGuard tunnel that made the worldwide remote monitoring possible in the first place. Plus multiple MicroSD backups, because a car on a track in Texas is a bad place to debug a corrupted boot partition.

Team members in graduation caps and gowns gathered around the solar car, whose upper surface is covered in solar panels. — The team with the car at graduation.

The stack

Frontend — Nuxt.js, TailwindCSS and Electron, with ThreeJS for the 3D visualisation
Backend — JavaScript, ExpressJS, WebSockets and a REST API handling and storing all telemetry
System — Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) on Arch Linux ARM, Hyprland and Aylur's GTK Shell, gpsd, USB serial, WireGuard
Extras — custom horn soundboard and playlist, WiFi and Bluetooth settings, a debug terminal, and export to Google Sheets

Result

2nd: Cruiser Division, 31st Solar Car Challenge.
20,000: Team hours designing, building and testing.
50+: Students across more than 12 majors.
1½ mi: Oval at Texas Motor Speedway, four days of racing.

Coding subteam — Zachary Lopez. Documentation at aev.zachl.tech.