Project Details
- Software Difficulty: 4/5
- Mechanical Difficulty: 4/5
- Project Group Size: 5-8
Welcome to your new member group! As a part of your onboarding process onto our team, you and your group will be working on a 10 week long project together! I’ll also be organizing socials, office hours, and in general helping y’all get settled into not only the club, but UCLA!
On my team, you will be designing our electronics team’s hardware-in-the-loop software testbench.
An example of a hardware-in-the-loop testbench for an electric skateboard. Credit: Gabriel Staples
That’s quite a mouthful, so let’s break it down. A software testbench is exactly what it implies, a system where our team of software engineers can test changes they make to the code, before putting it on the car.
The hardware-in-the-loop part means that we’ll be mimicking the hardware on the car as closely as possible on our testbench, so that when we test everything together, it’s as close to normal operation as possible. This enables our software team to rapidly prototype software changes, without needing to occupy valuable time on the car.
Typically, software development is bottlenecked by having access to the hardware they’re programming. In our case, that’s the car itself! Typically, this is sometime in late winter or early spring. By completing this project, you’ll help get software development started months earlier.
If you’d like to join the software team for this project, I recommend that you are experienced with C/C++, Python, and/or Linux. We will be making heavy use of all these technologies to get our system up and running, and we just don’t have to time to teach them as well.
If you’d like to join the hardware team for this project, you’ll need experience with (any) CAD software, as we’ll be designing mock versions of the actual components on the car! We make use of SolidWorks!
Reminders
- Fill out the New Member Project Form
- Install the required software listed in Lesson 1
Resources
- Google C++ Style Guide
- ETH Zurich Digital Control Class (Not Necessary, But Interesting)
Meet Your Project Lead
My name is Rama! I’m a 4th year undergraduate electrical engineering major. I’ve been on Baja for all 4 years of my time at UCLA, and in my time on the team, I’ve occupied the following positions:
- Year 1: Electronics New Member
- Year 2: Electronics Hardware Project Engineer
- Year 3: Baja Technical Director
- This Year: All-Racing President
My interests are in control theory, digital signal processing, and I’m a tinkerer by heart. I love pushing the boundaries on our team, using novel methods and data-driven design.