Renesas MCU Car Rally 2017

The Experience

Working on the car for the MCU car rally in my team of 5 people definitely had it’s ups and downs as all team efforts do. However, working in such a tight group on an inspired project was great experience and I would do it all over again.

Here is the final group video detailing the process of making and testing the car:

This is the car competing in the first round of the competition

Unfortunately, the car came off the track after the bridge section due to the fact that the car didn’t have any breaks. To slow the car down we had to add negative speed to the motors.

Since we only had 1 practice run on the real track we had no idea what the values needed to be to get the car to slow down after the bridge and obviously we didn’t set up the values right. Another hindrance was the car had no speedometer so braking was pure guesswork. Given more time I’m sure we could have produced a better result but our car still stood out as a strong competitor with only a few errors.

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The Process

Early on we were mostly concerned with building the hardware and constructing the chassis for the car so not much planning was involved. After the car was fully built and we needed to write the logic and carry out tests, we started documenting test plans, update logs and team member participation records.

For those interested in the documentation for this project I have linked it here. It includes the team plan, build log, test log and even the final code at the bottom of the document.