Team Solarium is a group of engineering students from Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering, Pune that has designed and manufactured an electric solar vehicle. The team compete in Asia’s biggest solar challenge, the Electric Solar Vehicle Championship (ESVC) and are currently working towards the ESVC 3000+, a 1600km cross-country race between Delhi and Pune that takes place in September 2021.

Kvaser has supplied a Kvaser Memorator Pro 2xHS v2 and a Kvaser Blackbird v2 to help their efforts. With the team currently in the literature and design phase, they have used the Kvaser tools for prototyping and will soon integrate them into the vehicle design. Commented Divya Rajput, marketing representative for the team: “The Kvaser devices have helped us improve the overall CAN architecture by increasing the efficiency of our data management and acquisition systems. The Memorator Pro v2 will be used to filter and log data from different CAN nodes in the vehicle in different formats, whilst the Blackbird v2 will wirelessly transmit vehicle data through an infrastructure network to a remote monitoring device in order to validate the CAN bus data.”

Solarium has used Kvaser’s free CanKing CAN bus monitor with virtual CAN drivers to validate the data communication. Noted Rajput: “It is very easy to tweak the parameters in CanKing, as per our requirements. The interface is user-friendly and easy to use. We have also used Kvaser add-ons in MATLAB for simulation of data filtering at nodes and broadcasting on the CAN Bus.”

Invictus 3.0, Team Solarium’s 2019 entry.

The main objective of the Invictus 4.0 is to drive 1600 km on a single charge. To do this, the car has almost doubled in size and gained a custom solar array. Another area of improvement is the autonomous driving system. Solarium is keen to enter the race’s optional autonomous challenge, which would add 200 points to their score.

All at Kvaser wish Team Solarium, who we know are working round the clock, tremendous success for their 2021 season!