Equipe PAC Baja prototype display project

Hi, I am Pedro from Equipe PAC Baja, an college Baja SAE team from Brazil, based in Bauru - SP.

What is a Baja SAE prototype?

The Baja SAE BRASIL program is a challenge launched to Engineering students that offers the chance to apply in practice the knowledge acquired in the classroom, aiming to increase their preparation for the job market. By participating in the Baja SAE program, the student becomes involved with a real case of development of an off road vehicle, from its conception, detailed design, construction and testing. And the most exciting thing is that the winning teams are invited to participate in the international competition, in the United States!

Who are we?

Since 1996 our college, UNESP or State University of São Paulo has been involved with the Baja SAE program. At the moment our team has 35 members from different areas, from engineering and physics to public relations and psychology.

What happened with the display panel?

In the national competition contested by the Team in 2022, one of the biggest project problems encountered was the visibility and effectiveness of the display on the prototype's panel. The display's main function is to quickly and accurately display data to the pilot during the races in which we compete. However, our old display had a TFT screen with very low visibility and difficult programming, which led the Team to make the decision to develop its own display.

Based on this, we defined two main objectives for the project: to improve visibility and reduce the display's power consumption. The solution? To develop a display on a printed circuit board with high-brightness multiplexed SMD LEDs. The entire circuit board design was developed in specific software and from this, we generated a CAD model that allowed us to think about the best fixation for the robustness and ergonomics of the prototype.

How does PCB Way help us?

After completing the entire PCB project, we needed to print the first test board, and PCB Way helped us with that. The result was excellent; the new LED display consumes half the current of the TFT display while having infinitely better visibility. We thank PCB Way for their support in this project and now seek more sponsorship to continue printing PCBs with PCB Way in our future projects. Among these future projects, the following stand out:

• A new PCB for the car's ECU
• A new PCB for radio data transmission for real-time telemetry of the prototype
• Optimizations in the display PCB