Raspberry Pi-Based Low-Cost System for Electrical Parameters Gathering and Analysis for Performance Evaluation of Electric Vehicles

In recent years, both the manufacture and sales of electric vehicles have significantly grown compared with traditional vehicles. This growth has favored the creation of tools that measure and evaluate this class of vehicles’ mechanical and electrical operation quickly, simply, and efficiently. Nevertheless, the measurement of electric vehicle parameters can be a challenge due to the fact that the required data acquisition (DAQ) equipment is expensive and thus of limited availability. This work describes a low-cost data acquisition system to simplify and reduce the cost of measuring the current and voltage parameters of electric vehicles. The proposed system is based on a Raspberry PI 3b+ microcomputer and it was evaluated during different driving cycles. The results were compared with the data obtained using a professional Dewesoft Sirius system for validation. The Raspberry Pi-based low-cost system achieved comparable performance to commercial systems (with a measurement error of less than 1%), despite having a lower sampling rate. Furthermore, unlike other systems, the proposed platform is an easy-to-set universal solution that can store the measured data, display them in real-time, graph them, and export the information for analysis with other specialized statistical tools. The main contribution of this work lies in the fact that the proposed low-cost DAQ system can be easily cloned, and the components’ cost of the prototype is about 10 times less than the price of the commercial systems.