In the spring of 2003, a formula race car team captain approached us to see if we could fix his car’s wireless telemetry system. The team was having a hard time obtaining the real-time data needed to tune the car at the track instead of the shop. They had an expensive MoTec data acquisition system in place, but it wasn’t wireless and couldn’t capture all the necessary data points. We knew that a microcontroller with a variety of interfaces could easily control off-the-shelf ADCs and counters in order to provide all the data points. So, we decided to build a complete wireless telemetry system, from data acquisition to software, on the pit crew’s end (see Figure 1). This became our senior project for our final year at the University of Akron.

We tried to keep the hardware flexible, maintainable, and easy to interface. The software is even more flexible. You can use this project for other applications like data acquisition, industrial/process control, and even laboratory automation.