// Project case study
Telemetry Communication Board
Live wireless telemetry and GPS tracking for a Formula SAE electric race car.
The Telemetry Communication Board streams live vehicle data from Northeastern's Formula SAE electric car to the pit wall, giving the team real-time position, speed, and system-health visibility during testing and competition.
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Electrical Project Lead
- Context
- Northeastern Electric Racing
- Tech stack
- PCB DesignGNSS/GPSRF TelemetryPythonPyQt6Google Maps APISD Logging
- Live
- vehicle telemetry
- 1 m
- GNSS positioning class
- 2×
- redundant data paths (RF + SD)
On-vehicle hardware
The board pairs a programmable, ultra-robust meter-level GNSS positioning chip with a wireless telemetry link, streaming position, speed, heading, and time in real time. An integrated microcontroller mirrors every packet to an onboard SD card, so no data is lost if the RF link drops mid-lap.
Ground station software
A custom Python ground station built with PyQt6 ingests the live stream, plots vehicle position and heading on an embedded Google Maps view, and flags faults for remote debugging — turning raw packets into decisions the team can make between laps.