Spark Book ⚡
Welcome to Illinois Tech Motorsports' Spark Book! This is a collection of standards, guides, and documentation for designing and manufacturing a Formula SAE (FSAE) Electric racecar. This book is the culmination of 15+ years experience of building electric and hybrid race cars. This book is a living document and is continously updated and edited as needed.
History
IIT Motorsports began building formula-style racecars in 2007 at the Formula Hybrid competition, and converted to full electric cars by 2012. Due to poor document management and failed knowledge-transfer, the team often found themselves having to backtrack and re-learn the basics every year instead of seeing consistent progress. The Spark Book was created in June 2022 by Noah Husby to document standards and guides for creating low voltage schematics quickly. The book has since grown to contain guides and standards for all subsystems on the car as well as hardware manuals, EV concepts, and terminologies. The decision was made to open-source the Spark Book to share the standards and guides with all FSAE teams and to allow for feedback and documentation from contributors outside of the team.
The Goal
The Spark Book was created to achieve two goals:
- Increase Knowledge Transfer: This document serves as a public reference for standardizing the team's vehicle designs. The Spark Book is used to understand how previous teams made design decisions which reduces the amount of guessing and uncertainty that comes with designing a Formula SAE car. Since the document is public, alumni of the team and outside contributors can continue to update and improve the document without being a current member.
- Reduce Design Cycle Time: Designing a Formula SAE car requires many detailed and complex susbsystems to come together to form a final product. The Spark Book contains standards to help keep design across all of the subsystems consistent to allow for easier integration. The book does not replace the need for a dedicated systems engineer, but acts as a supplementary ruleset for how each subsystem should be designed. Adhering to these standards reduce the amount of time and parts necessary for integration.
Get Started
Get started reading one of the following sections:
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Structures
Standards for the chassis, suspension, and powertrain. Contains guides for Solidworks features and tools
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Energetics
Low and high voltage concepts. Contains standards for schematic design and layout using Altium Designer.
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Contribute
Request new documentation, open pull-requests, or report errors in the Spark Book
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Resources
Design reports and open-source code for IIT Motorsports