Solar Splash competition promotes engineering innovation, sustainable energy solutions, and hands-on experience in clean marine technologies
About Solar Splash event
Solar Splash is an intercollegiate competition where students design and race solar-electric boats.
The competition promotes engineering innovation, clean energy solutions, and hands-on experience in sustainable energy, efficiency, and system design.
Technical challenge
This year’s Stevens Team boat features a new motor controller, outboard drive system, and solar charge controller. Integrating these systems and ensuring reliable operation within the project schedule created a significant engineering challenge.
Previous teams could record data only for short periods using the built-in controller software. To enable continuous data logging and faster analysis, Stevens Team required a new software solution.
CANtrace along with Kvaser U100 adapter allowed the team to plot data with Solar-powered Sprint
CANtrace, together with Kvaser U100 adapter, enabled the team to plot real-time data such as current, voltage, RPM, torque, and temperature. The team used this data to test different propeller and gear ratio configurations during sea trials and to troubleshoot performance-limiting issues. TK Engineering’s CANtrace software and Kvaser’s U100 adapter played a critical role in the project.
With an extremely limited ability to get the boat on the water ahead of the competition for testing, being able to understand what was happening with the motor controller in real-time was absolutely critical. CANtrace enabled the team to make decisions and adjust variables immediately during testing instead of collecting data for later analysis when real-time changes were no longer possible.