Íslenska
Live telemetry system based on OpenMCT for the Formula Student racing team at University of Iceland. The hardware reads measurements from a CAN bus interface and sends them to a cloud environment over MQTT.
Introduction
Spark Telemetry is the live telemetry system for Team Spark, the University of Iceland's Formula Student team, which designs and builds an electric race car every year. A telemetry module with an LTE/4G modem and antenna is mounted on the back of the driver's headrest. The module includes a Raspberry Pi that reads measurements from the car's CAN bus and streams them over the cellular network to a server using MQTT.
On the cloud side, the team can follow every sensor in real time in OpenMCT, NASA's open-source visualization framework, whether they are in the pit, the spectator stand or from a different country. To handle the high volume of data, we wrote a custom client, can-mqtt-bridge, in C++, along with a web service called Mission Control that gives an overview of every battery cell and sensor and lets the team edit the CAN bus configuration.
Want to use it yourself?
The project is open source and anyone is welcome to use it for their own vehicle. The blog post (see link above) walks through setting up the server, building the hardware and installing the client. If you run into problems or have questions, feel free to reach out.