3SP Summer Internship & Beyond: Electric Vehicle Conversion (EVC)

This summer, I was a research intern for the STEM Student Scholars Program (3SP) at my college for about 10 weeks. I was a part of the Electric Vehicle Conversion (EVC) project, on both the truck and motorcycle teams, to convert the gas-powered vehicles into electric.

I was primarily on the instrumentation team of the truck. We focused on continuing the development of the dashboard by wiring and soldering hardware and programming an Arduino Mega.

Our team introduced version control software, Git, to manage the Arduino code. We also uploaded the repository onto GitHub. There’s more information about the hardware and software there!

For the last two-ish weeks, I moved over to the motorcycle team because I expressed interest in motorcycles from the very beginning of the internship. There I learned how to drill and tap holes. I also found out that I would definitely need a garage in the future. Where else would I store a plasma cutter and work on project cars?

At the end of my internship, my team presented at the 2024 STEM C^2 Research Summit. On November 8, 2024, two other team members and I were poster presenters for our research at the GSLSAMP/NNJB2B STEM Research Conference. I got to meet some really cool people and check out the Rutgers Solar Car and the Rutgers Formula Racing team!

We also drafted a research paper that will be submitted at the end of 2024, which describes our why and how. Since I was primarily on the truck team, I contributed to the truck’s paper. The objective was to analyze and compare the carbon footprint of a converted electric vehicle to equivalent gas-powered vehicles (as well as contribute to the breadth of EV knowledge and aid in the adoption of EVs). This page will be updated with a link or resource to the paper!

In general, we’ve been trying to coordinate meeting every week or every other week to work on the truck throughout the fall semester. Our most recent test run took place on October 27, 2024. We hit a top speed of 30 MPH around the school’s parking lot and collected another set of data to see how it compares to the truck’s original 14 MPG.

This page is a work-in-progress (WIP).