Motorcycle Land Speed Racing

Spring 2025

The Motorcycle Land Speed Racing senior-design project builds a tough on-bike data logger for our 50 cc record machine at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Its job is to grab wheel speed, air speed, exhaust gas temperature, and cooler (water) temperature every run so the crew can check the graphs, tweak jetting and gearing, and push past the 85 mph class record. Hardware is simple and solid. An Arduino UNO R4 beside the sensors turns each signal into 12-bit numbers with an SPI ADC, then shoots 500 kbps packets to the Arduino “RaceLogic” board. The arduino time-stamps the stream and saves it on an SD card as plain TXT, ready for any laptop. Rubber mounts, checksums, and retry logic keep the logs safe through vibration. This semester we logged full shakedown runs with zero lost samples, proved the water-temperature sensor tracks coolant shifts accurately, and cut system draw under 150 mA. Biggest hurts are noise on long sensor leads and slow writes when the SD card gets too many reads. Next moves are better cable shielding, a dual-rail power board, and a LoRa radio so data leaves the bike wirelessly between runs.

1 Lifts 

Artifacts

Name Description
Project Poster Project Poster   Download
Executive Summary Executive Summary   Download
Project Summary Video Video   Link
Project Document Documentation of the entire project   Download
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