Apprentis d'Auteuil "Les Immortels" car update - Louis 5th wheel

 

We had a brainstorm at the beginning of the project, about what devices could bring extra value to the project, and Louis suggested that we have some way of measuring the speed & acceleration of the car, in order to compare different tyre materials as this is a straight-line, dragster style race and we have to design our own wheels and tyres. And he suggested we do it with magnets on a wheel, like a bicycle speedometer. In order to keep this from compromising the car design, we decided to make it into a trailer that can be installed for testing and removed for racing, and make it autonomous with a radio link to a tablet or phone. 

In the picture you can see the 5th wheel device Louis designed on CATIA. It uses an arduino Nano33 BLE to gather the data and connects - or will, when we've finished the code - to an app made with MIT App Inventor running on an Android tablet or phone. MIT App Inventor is amazing for this, it uses visual programming to do just about anything including radio communication. The Android device will display speed and acceleration graphs. Under development! 

In case you're curious, this is what 5th wheel systems look like for full-size vehicles: they have in many cases been replaced by GPS but they are still used in vehicle testing. In the case of our car, we are running indoor and GPS was not an option! 

Bonus: view of the car printing on the 3DXLab's Ultimaker 5, in two pieces