Our purpose

The Software team's main responsibility is to monitor telemetry data coming from the solar car, including, for example, the state of charge for cells in the battery box, the amount of current being delivered to the MPPTs, the temperature in the motor controllers, and much more. While Mechanical and Electrical are the teams that actively build the car's structure and its circuitry, Software's role is nevertheless fundamental. By tracking telemetry data, we allow the team to:

• Diagnose issues with the electrical components on the car during development.
• Monitor relevant information during a race both from a remote dashboard and an onboard display.
• Predict failure and investigate their causes when they occur.
• Persist telemetry signals in a database for later analysis.
• Make more informed decisions about race strategy and future design cycles.

In the next chapter, you'll start the process of building a simple telemetry processing pipeline from scratch.