Nathan Cheek

This school year, I redesigned HyTech Racing’s Formula SAE Brake System Plausibility Device (BSPD). Formula SAE Electric has a ruleset which competing teams must follow, and the BSPD is one of the required safety systems defined in these rules. The BSPD is a safety mechanism to prevent a runaway vehicle. It has two sensor inputs. One senses how much current is traveling from the high voltage battery pack into the motor. The other senses whether the brakes are being actuated. The idea is that if the motor keeps outputting torque after the driver has let off the accelerator pedal, they can press the brake pedal, which will initiate a hardware shutdown of the high voltage system, cutting off power to the motor.

This May, my team won first place in the electric category of Formula Hybrid, an international Formula Student vehicle engineering competition. Georgia Tech’s ECE department recently published an article I wrote about the team’s success this year:

https://ece.gatech.edu/news/2023/12/georgia-tech-wins-top-honors-formula-hybrid-competition

Dartmouth also published an article about the event.

This summer I built a CAN Shield for the Raspberry Pi Zero. The shield is the exact size of the Raspberry Pi, and fits directly on top of the computer. CAN Bus is a common protocol in use on vehicles like HyTech Racing’s Formula Student race car. This shield is much smaller than many of the shields I have seen online, which were designed for the larger original Raspberry Pi size.

In 2016 I put together an 10x10 RGB LED matrix using individually addressable APA-106 8mm LEDs. These lights are drop in replacements for the expensive NeoPixels sold by Adafruit, but instead of $1 per LED, they cost around $.20 each. I purchased several lots of 100 on AliExpress. The benefit to this type of RGB LED is that a large number of LEDs can be controlled with a single pin on a microcontroller. Controlling LEDs by directly switching them individually quickly becomes a cumbersome task, but by placing an integrated chip in each bulb, hundreds of lights can be controlled digitally.

Recently I purchased a Ubiquity EdgeRouter Lite to replace an old Dell Optiplex running VyOS in my dorm. I was impressed at how easy it was to set up, and how compatible RouterOS configurations are with VyOS configurations. However, I found the EdgeRouter to be much slower with OpenVPN tunnels.