Data acquisition system for a 600cc formula SAE race car

Motivated by the requirement of Formula Manipal, Manipal University's official entry into Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers), a DAQ (Data acquisition) system was designed. This document describes the approach used to achieve the primary design goal of overall reduction in acquisition to analysis time. The DAQ system for Formula Manipal needed to be rugged, deterministic, modular, flexible, easily expandable and user friendly. National Instruments products were selected and used for this purpose. The compatibility of the state-of-the-art automation controller cRIO (Compact Reconfigurable Input Output) with LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench) allowed for the system to meet all the design requirements and reduce the development time significantly. The ingenious hardware design of cRIO was found capable of simultaneously logging the data stream along with analysis results during the test run. This system also features an offline time relative cockpit view of dashboard, as viewed by driver during the race.