Raheel Farouk

Tillet Electronic Brake Bias Controller 

This project was done for the University of Pittsburgh FSAE Team during my time as the Lead Performance and Data Aquisition Engineer. The goal of the project was to be able to electronically change and control the brake bias on our car.

The original motivation for this project was to get rid of the original system we had which was a knob that rotated a cable that eventually rotated the brake balance bar which is what caused the brake bias to be adjusted; the original system was far from accurate or usable. In addition to the driver having no immediate feedback to what the exact brake bias value was it sometimes would get stuck and not even rotate.

Our solution was to mount a motor to turn the balance bar and a rotary position sensor to read the current position of the balance bar, these cpomponents were then conneted to our MoTeC M150 ECU on which I was able to write custom firmware with a PID Control Loop to rotate the balance bar to the correct position. I was able to combine this with one of our driver switches so that the driver could change the brake bias with the tun of a knob. This implementation also makes use of various transation and calibration tables that will allow for us to be able to do Vehicle Speed and Steering Angle based automatic brake bias adjustment in the future, should the team decide that it would be beneficial.