Illini Electric Motorsports

Circuit Design and Firmware for UIUC Formula SAE

Formula Car Sketch (Created with Copilot)

Illini Electric Motorsports (IEM) is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Formula SAE team.

As part of the team, I am leading the development of the main vehicle control board (or Safety Board).

Using Altium, I designed schematics for the Safety Board, incorporating power distribution, fault management, and status indicators. I executed a structured testing and validation plan for every circuit, using the gathered data to inform and implement design improvements for the V2 iteration.

On the software side, I developed an ISO-TP transport layer test plan to validate CAN communication across multiple ECUs, ensuring compliance with ISO-TP 2016 standards and verifying message delivery using PCAN-USB. I also built a cost-effective hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test setup using LabJack U6-Pro to simulate ECU I/O, integrating a Python toolchain into the Bazel build system to run automated tests with pytest and the LabJack API. Signal analysis and plotting were performed using Matplotlib and NumPy.

A render of the completed V2 Safety Board for 2026: Safety Board V2 Render