Every year, Eco-Runner Team Delft designs and builds a car to compete in the Shell Eco Marathon. The vehicle consuming the least amount of fuel to complete the track within a set time limit gets to take the trophy home.
Challenges
Eco-runner team Delft needed to enable real-time streaming of diagnostic information from the vehicle, which would later help in providing tactical guidelines during the competition.
Congested Wi-Fi at a competition groundbase was also a challenge, connection was unreliable because 200 student teams had to use it.
“On the vehicle side, we used even more of the available features; powering the device in the vehicle was easy as it could be directly connected to the battery, without any devices in-between. Furthermore, the built-in GPS and fleet tracking software, where we can see the vehicle position in real time as well as monitor its speed, saved us a great amount of development time and was used to give the strategy team a visual representation of the location of the car. We are very happy with the solution Peplink could offer us as it proved to be easy, reliable, and timesaving and we will most likely continue to use this setup”.
Solution
Based on KommaGo’s advice, the team used two Pepwave MAX BR1 mini’s for the connection; one for in the vehicle, one for the ‘groundbase’. Although there was Wi-Fi available for all contestants at the groundbase, the connection was unreliable because 200 student teams had to use it. This made the stability of the Pepwave router very valuable.
