High Speed Wireless Optical System for Motorsport Data Loggers

Telemetry allows to monitor the behavior of a system and it is applied to many different and popular fields such as motorsport. In this case, a data-logger collects all the data coming from different automobile sensors providing a very reliable image of the car status and a better vehicle setup. This paper is focused on the development of a new data-logging system for motorsport application, which meets several process constraints, such as high throughput and low power consumption that, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the available devices on the market were not able to satisfy. The new data-logger consists of a fixed and a removable part, which exchanges data through a transceiver exploiting the visible light communication (VLC) technology. In this way, every physical contact between the two parts of the system is avoided. All the communication procedures are managed by a micro-controller mounted on each part of the system. The transceiver consists of the AFBR-1634Z and AFBR-2634Z (Broadcom Limited, San Jose, CA, USA) components, the optical fiber transmitter and the receiver, respectively, produced by Broadcom Inc. By keeping the distance short between them, they can assure a real wireless communication, even without using a high throughput technology like optical fiber. The entire system is powered by an inductive coupling system. In order to test the transceiver, it is connected to a micro-controller reaching a data rate of 8 Mbit/s. But even better performance is achieved by upgrading the micro-controller and changing the transmission technique, connecting the transceiver to the serial peripheral interface (SPI) port of the micro-controller: in this case, a data rate of 21 Mbit/s is reached, perfectly suitable with the application requirements and even further.