Race for data: As much as 5% to 10% of each F1 car is new every fortnight
The deafening engine roar and flashing speed of a Formula One racing car seem a world away from the slight hum and static nature of, say, a domestic fridge. But there is one respect in which the technologies of the two are likely to converge in the coming years. That is in their use of electronics to monitor their operation and internet-based communications to transmit the resulting data to remote users.
In the case of the F1 car that use is already well-established. It is summarised by Peter van Manen, vice-president of McLaren Applied Technologies, which makes electronic systems for use in F1 and road cars made by its famous namesake parent company and other clients. During a typical race, he says, a car will be transmitting telemetry data on the performance of the multiple systems it contains to its off-track support team at a rate of 2-4MB per second. That can add up to as much as 1.5GB per race.
Much of that data will immediately go a lot further than just the side of the track – up into the ‘cloud’ of the internet and down to the team’s headquarters where it will be put to use in the iterative cycle of modification and rebuilding that is the hallmark of F1. “As much as 5% to 10% of each car is new every fortnight,” says van Manen.
That rate of product development may not be the norm elsewhere, but van Manen observes that there is still an “interesting linkage between what happens on the track and what is increasingly happening all around us”. That connection is about “measuring things, doing something immediately with the information, and then taking it back to base and doing even more with it”.
In the case of F1 a specific instance is the introduction to the roster of permitted technologies this year of ‘energy recovery’ techniques using lithium-ion batteries. This innovation marks a convergence between F1 and the hybrid and electric cars that are becoming an increasing presence on the roads.
In the case of McLaren, the bulk of the components in those onboard systems will be provided by electronics company Freescale. Peter Highton, principal staff engineer with Freescale in the UK, says the company became a supplier to McLaren back in 1999 when it was still known as Motorola but the relationship developed to become a partnership in 2008. What this means in practice, he says, is that Freescale “allows McLaren early visibility of technologies we are developing, in particular our microcontrollers for automotive use and our microprocessors for data communications”.
In return Freescale gets access to an application environment which not only pushes the boundaries of the technologies in terms of their performance and application, but also requires highly compressed testing and validation cycles.
Highton agrees that the introduction of energy recovery technologies to the F1 arena is a significant development. It means that a narrowly focused engine management application has been expanded into a much broader remit of complete powertrain management. So F1 is now, he says, an application area for proper “parallel hybrid technology”.
As with road cars using similar technologies, any ability to enhance the power-to-weight ratio of the system has the potential to provide a big competitive advantage – whether literally on the racetrack or metaphorically in the market. “I can already see that control of the charging and discharging of lithium-ion batteries is getting a major boost from their use in F1 racing,” he says.
Big data: Telemetry is becoming a valuable tool in product development
Freescale’s involvement in this aspect of F1 is not confined to McLaren’s cars because one of the rules is that vehicles from every team have to use an identical engine control unit (ECU) from the same source. That source is McLaren Applied Technologies, which has been the sole approved supplier of F1 ECUs since 2008. Interestingly, the ECU is part of the 5% of an F1 car that has to remain unchanged throughout the course of a season.
But is there really a parallel between all of this and a domestic fridge? Highton thinks there will be one day, through the internet of things – a world in which devices of all sorts that have previously been isolated and autonomous become sources of data and communication in large-scale networks of ‘intelligent’ machines. This is already apparent in vehicles. As Highton says, the amount of electronics being added to cars means they are becoming “intelligent mobile platforms”.
In perhaps just three or four years they will be not just “self-diagnostic” but also “connected to each other and to the cloud”.
For this reason, he adds, Freescale’s relationship with McLaren will continue to be important. This will be the inevitable consequence of the fact that the trends driving technology development in F1 will become even closer to those in the passenger car world – “smaller engines, less fuel, hybrid powertrains and recovered energy”.
But the concept of the internet of things at a much wider level – one that could include fridges and domestic devices such as electricity meters and burglar alarms – is also edging towards reality. In Freescale’s case it was marked this year by its introduction of a product it calls the One Box. This is the core piece of equipment that could sit at the centre of a network of devices inside a home and connect them to the outside world over the internet.
The One Box is built around a Freescale i.MX 6 processor and runs software from Oracle and ARM. It is an open-source product intended to help kick-start development initiatives by other parties. So no details of its software and hardware elements are kept from the market. All the information is there for interested companies or individuals to take on-board if they want to develop relevant applications. “The design files and software are available for anyone who wants to create their own gateways,” says Highton.
He expects the market to grow fast in the near future. He points out that some big players are already in the market and that serious money has been spent.
In February, for instance, Google spent $3.2 billion to purchase US company Nest which had developed an ‘intelligent’ thermostat capable of integration with internet-based communications systems.
Highton says that such a device lets whoever is monitoring the network “know when there is someone in the house” – as would the opening and closing of a fridge door. That information can be used in all sorts of ways, for instance targeted advertising. Another sort of device, say a motion detection sensor with similar communications capabilities, might just as feasibly alert a remote homeowner to the presence of a burglar in their house.
As yet, Highton admits, the One Box is “not a product that is making us any money” – perhaps because it is available to anyone who wants one for just $199. He also concedes that very little of its hardware content or capabilities are derived directly from Freescale’s F1 experience.
Home automation, he says, does not require either the realtime data transmission or the sheer volume handling capabilities of racing car telemetry. Data transmission rates are in tens of kilobits rather than tens of megabits.
And the communications standards are the likes of Bluetooth or ZigBee – a “low energy” specification suitable for intermittent rather than continuous transmission, wired Ethernet and ADSL.
But there is still a broad similarity between the technological capabilities required for the two application areas. Both are about “connectivity, control and interoperability”. Highton says that over the next few years the parallels between F1 telemetry and the internet of things that will link electricity meters, light switches, burglar alarms and maybe even fridges will start to become even more apparent.
Monitoring and safety will be the key points of commonality.