I joined Blue Sky Solar Racing, the solar racing team at UofT in the winter semester of my first year!. I joined the electrical subteam as a member, not mechanical, as I thought it would be fun to maintain some balance between my passion for electronics and mechanical engineering! When I joined I was tasked with designing part of a new radio system, switching from the Xbee technology to LoRa technology, to reduce power consumption, increase range, and drastically reduce the price of the radios! The car's main computer has slots of different modules, and the radio was no exception, so depending on the event we could switch between XBee and LoRa as necessary! We also used this approach on the receiving side, as before the team created a new, non-modular device for every radio technology.

After designing the board, I spent a lot of time testing it, and wrote up internal documentation about how the specific board I designed works and how to talk to it! I created custom scripts and hardware to help me test the range of radio transmissions and data rate of transmission.

I joined the team late into their current cycle, so after working on the radio my work was mostly assembling circuit boards, then validating & testing them! One of the main circuit boards that I helped work on was our Power Hub, which is responsible for connecting and disconnecting the batteries from the rest of the car, lowering the voltage from the 151 volts of the battery pack to 12 volts for the computer and other low voltage equipment. The Power Hub is responsible for responding to critical shut down or "safe state" commands, such as battery over voltage/current/temperature, if the emergency stop switch is pressed either on the inside or outside of the vehicle.

I've also helped with other odd jobs, such as assembling the battery packs, working on the wiring harness, creating power switches for fans and the low voltage battery.

As we got closer to competing in the 2026 Formula Sun Grand Prix, it was time to start doing proper full system tests of the car! While we had lots of testing sessions scheduled, we were only able to complete a few, as there were a lot of issues that needed to be fixed that were discovered during testing. Whenever issues arose, the team worked diligently to fix the problems and get the car back on the road. I'd like to give a HUGE shoutout to the mechanical team, who worked around the clock and sacrificed sleep to fix issues with the braking system on the car. My team had a lot of issues regarding motor power, where while accelerating the screen and driver input would stop responding, and sometimes the motor would give out entirely and require a reboot of the car to return functionality. The loss of screen we assume to be due to electromagnetic interference as the motor draws high currents (as we still faced this issue in some regards through the rest of the car's life), and for the motor to work more reliably required a lot of tuning and research into the motor controller to get the acceptable power draw limits configured correctly.

At Formula Sun GP at the Brainerd International Speedway, we passed the electrical & battery inspection easily (and other subteams too!), however we were still facing reliability issues with the car while driving. The interference on the screen and driver input persisted, causing the car's computer to think that buttons were being pressed (even with a cyclic redundancy check), which was causing the horn to honk at random times, the car to suddenly flip into reverse, and could have caused the sensitive battery and solar array relays to turn on and off their connection to the high voltage lines unexpectedly. By improving the shielding of high voltage and low voltage wires we were able to increase the reliability, however it was still not perfect. In addition, when we charged up the batteries, the motor cut out issues we faced before returned, as we suspect due to the battery pack's high voltage, any brief voltage spike would cause the protection system to trip, spikes which we suspect are related to the car trying to enter reverse gear while at high speeds due to driver input not functioning correctly. With the driver input in a more reliable state due to increased shielding, the voltage spike issues also reduced.

Once we had passed all the inspections and the electrical system of the car was more stable, we were able to enter the track and start racing! We were able to drive at 50 km/h completely energy neutral, running solely off the power of the solar panels, keeping our batteries fully charged for when the sun would start to set. Unfortunately, after our 30th lap, our car had a major mechanical failure that fractured the chassis, so we had to bow out of the race. However, the team was in good spirits, as we made it a lot farther than the team did last year, leading up to the 2025 Formula Sun GP, there was basically no time for testing the car and there were major issues with a lot of the vehicle's system. We are all very proud of how far we made it!

On a more personal note, the radio I designed way back at the start of my time at Blue Sky did not perform very well at all, I should have asked more questions and made sure that what I designed would be useful and work at the race. But I have gained insight from those experiences and know the weak points of my design to create something better for the future.

Now that the race has been completed, and the cycle is over, most of the electrical team that joined before me is leaving, putting me and a few other people I trust to co-lead the electrical subteam for the start of the next car! I am really looking forward to a fresh start, every two years the team begins a new car from scratch! By helping assemble and validate boards, attending the testing sessions, and the race itself, I have collected a vast understanding of the car's system, both low voltage (computer, telemetry, sensors), and high voltage (battery packs, motor, solar panels/maximum power point trackers), and all the safety devices that work together. I also have a long list of improvements and modifications I would like to make based on seeing the current system to increase the reliability.

I am really looking forward to seeing what the future holds for me at Blue Sky!