On Northeastern’s Baja SAE team, I led the data acquisition subteam and the ergonomics subteam. I’ve been a part of the Baja team since my freshman year holding a wide variety of roles and gaining valuable experience with engineering leadership, manufacturing, and technical skills. Working on a largely mechanical team, I gained interdisciplinary communication skills and technical foundations.

This year, our story was triumphant. As we worked with half of the timeline that we would normally have, I was part of a leadership team that brought success again to the Northeastern Baja SAE team. After many long hours and weekends spent in the shop, we came home with 11th place in the Rochester International Baja SAE competition of 100 teams. I had personally made my contribution to this with my designs on the car, and direct work at the competition for the presentations. As one of the presenters, I helped our team achieve 9th place in the design presentation, personally presenting one of the best scoring ergonomics design presentations at the competition.

For the most recent season, the data acquisition team has been developing a custom comprehensive data acquisition system validating many of the design requirements. Deriving our data acquisition system design requirements from the mechanical validation requirements ensures that we are maximizing the potential for precise validation of the current car and data-driven design for future designs.

With the wide array of mechanical requirements to validate, the data acquisition system must include several types of sensors. Developing this system integrates strain gauge signal processing circuits, ride height sensing, temperature and pressure sensors, custom engine and wheel RPM sensors, and torque transducers to name a few. All of this is planned to be integrated together on a custom PCB running firmware on a Teensy microcontroller.

As a part of the leadership team, I also worked to define these design requirements. We looked to the competition fundamentals and rules to define the requirements for our car. Defining these requirements well gave us the foundation we needed for success as we worked with tight timelines and limited supplies.

Lastly, in addition to the electrical engineering skills and engineering leadership I learned on the team, I gained mechanical design and fabrication experience. Leading the ergonomics team, I interfaced with all other subteams to design the mounting tabs for nearly every component that was mounted to the chassis. I quickly learned how to use 3D CAD in Solidworks designing nearly 100 mechanical parts in a short few weeks.

Overall, on the Baja SAE team at Northeastern, I gained significant practical experience with electrical engineering, engineering leadership, and mechanical design.