Bolt

Built with Qt

Sustainable Racing with Bolt Electric Motorcycle — Fast Machines and Fast Dashboard Development.

 

 

Along with other like-minded companies, The Qt Company sponsors this innovative and sustainable project by providing the tools to develop the motorcycle's dashboard.

Need for Speed

The Bolt team at Virginia Tech has built a high-performance all-electric racing motorcycle and used Qt to create its equally powerful dashboard. Bolt chose Qt because of how fast and easy it is to iterate on the dashboard that was used to test, debug and monitor the health of the system throughout the process.

The BOLT team created a great-looking UI using Qt Quick's drag-and-drop design tool and readymade UI controls. The Qt Quick Compiler compiled the QML source code into the final binary which reduced boot time significantly.

 

"Qt provided an extensive and well documented framework which allowed us to rapidly develop a dashboard for our electric motorcycle."

Mary Galvin, BOLT Co-Team Lead

Dashboard built with Qt

The dashboard is the heart of the motorcycle. It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 and displays two different screens: One for racing and one for debugging. The racing screen displays the battery charge state with a gauge that changes colors at low levels, as well as RPM by way of a gauge that mimics a motor torque curve. The debug screen provides error messages that are useful for debugging the powertrain.

 Racing Screen 

  • Motor RPM
  • Battery state of charge
  • Soon to be lap times

Debug Screen

  • Battery voltages/currents
  • Motor temperature
  • Battery temperature
  • Motor torque

 

The Team

The BOLT Team is an interdisciplinary design team housed in the Joseph F. Ware Jr. Advanced Engineering Lab at Virginia Tech University. BOLT team members gain from the experience of applying their education in a hands-on environment.

The team consists of about 40 undergraduate students: 20 mechanical engineering, 10 electrical engineering and 10 computer engineering. Students work in interdisciplinary teams and learn about material outside their major.

Designing and hand-building a motorcycle which harmonizes with the talents of elite and highly-skilled riders is no light undertaking, and there is little room for error or complacency. BOLT is a valuable experience for students, requiring professional attitudes, innovative thinking, and the drive to succeed.

Related Cases

Need a dashboard for your EV? We've made a few ourselves, we might have some tips for you!

 

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