Baja SAE is a colligate competition were students design and build a single person off-road vehicle. This club taught me a lot about design through hands on fabrication. I was a member of my school's team all four years of college, and served two years as the drivetrain lead.

Gearbox Design

I designed a two-stage gearbox with a dog clutch shifter. A chain and sprocket system were chosen due to the high cost of meshed gears. The biggest design constraints were that the input and output shafts of the custom gearbox needed to be in the same location as the gearbox used in 2019.

Arduino IR Tachometer

I designed and printed a custom Arduino controlled tachometer to measure CVT rpms. Since a CVT has a continuous range of gear ratios, I wanted to plot the rpms of the secondary pulley while the car was driving. This would allow me to plot the actual rpm range, so that an ideal rpm could be chosen as the input rpm for the custom gearbox.

The hardest part was figuring out where to mount the sensor. Not only is the secondary pulley rotating about the gearbox input shaft, it also expands and compresses along the axis of the shaft. We identified the best sensor mounting location to be directly off the gearbox housing, which required a custom mount.

Pedal Designs

The official SAE rules required the pedal to extend the throttle cable 1.5 inches without bending the cable more than 15 degrees.

2020 Update

Unfortunately the Covid-19 pandemic forced us to immediately stop all work on the car in March 2020. Most of the team members, including me, will have already graduated before the quarantine is lifted.