Making Design Choices - Electric Vehicles

Design Choices -- Using a model car as a prototype

There is no doubt that Australians are steadily increasing their interest in electrical vehicles. In the STEM class we can model some of the decisions that car makers and designers must make before they can build and sell electrical vehicles. It is also certain that these vehicles, both the prototype and the real ones, will run by using computer programs that run on microcontroller units ( MCUs ). In a prototype the designer will program, test and program the MCU until the desirable performance characteristics are discovered. The most desirable performance characteristic feature in Australia is "how far will the vehicle travel before recharging. MCUs that we use in class could be:

the more recent Raspberry Pi Pico which is faster but harder to program! ( left one on the picture below )
the older Arduino Uno with very little memory but cheap and reliable. ( middle one on the picture below )
and the fully configured Raspberry Pi single-board computer which requires some understanding of the Linux operating system and takes some time to learn!

Shown here are two vehicle models that have different components. Each component allows the vehicle to show different design choices.
The one on the left ( Car 3 ) has an Arduino Mega MCU with a specialized motor controller shield slotted into the top of the Arduino. The one on the right ( NEC 8 ) has a smaller Arduino Nano with a much simpler L298N Motor driver module.
Car 3 has a Bluetooth controller and NEC 8 has an Infrared sensor.

Tasks and Activities

Shown here are three different microcontrollers. They are the Raspberry Pi Pico, Arduino UNO and the Raspberry Pi single-board computer. You have seen and set them up in class. What is the difference between them ( apart from their size? ) ( Hint: read the paragraph at the top of this page! )
From your knowledge of microcontroller units, which of the three could be used in a vehicle project in class?
In general, what is happening the size, power requirements, and speed of more recent microcontroller units?
What are some of the construction features of the model cars have you seen in class?
In a "real" electric vehicle that we might drive on the roads what -- in your opinion -- are two very desirable performance features?

Don't forget to email your choices/answers to Mr. Widmer by the end of this week. Keep a copy of that email in your Google Docs folder. The contents on your Google docs folder is used in the final assessment this year.