7/20/2025 - 7/29/2025: Moving Into Design / Knowledge Transfer / Meet Our PM!

[Anton Walvoord]

Northwestern Formula Racing

@nufsae | northwesternformularacing.com

Summer Newsletter - 7.29.2025

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Research & Design:

Hello NFR aficionados! This past week marked a transition point for the Summer. Up until now our members had been adjusting to their new roles and performing research for their upcoming projects. Now that research phase is coming to a close and design work is beginning. We are building out our block model for our car, and our suspension geometry will be finalized this coming Sunday.

Our sub-team leads have finalized the design requirements for each of their projects, providing a clear direction moving forward. These include specific features that must be implemented, competition rules to abide by, and quantitative goals to improve from NFR25 for every single project. Writing down concrete goals makes our expectations for each project clear. Every year we recruit a large number of new members, and it can be difficult for them to adjust. These requirements help members understand what they're supposed to be doing and what their end product should look like.

        

As we move into the design process, we've begun to have scope meetings with each sub-team. This past week we met with Chassis and Data Acquisition, reviewing previous areas of weakness, plans for changes, and discussing dependencies. These meetings are open to everyone on the team and aim to improve visibility early on in the design process to keep everyone in the loop.

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Knowledge Transfer:

Continuing the theme of design, our Electrical side hosted a lesson covering circuit and layout design. They covered many common sub-circuits, with a particular focus toward protection against electromagnetic interference (EMI). EMI is an extremely common source of issues, and knowing how to use these protection circuits will allow our new board designers to make more reliable systems. This lesson was also a part of our plans to standardize portions of our electrical designs, such as having reverse polarity protections on all our boards and having each project use the same LED's to mean the same things -- essentially a shared design language.

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Meet Our Project Manager!

The next exec member I'll introduce in detail: Myself!

My name is Anton Walvoord and I'm a junior from the suburbs of Chicago studying Computer Engineering. I was on Energetics my freshman year, developing the power distribution module, sense PCB's, and FPC's. In sophomore year I was the Power Distribution sub-team lead, in charge of the car's electrical harness, low voltage battery, and power distribution module.

This year I'm excited to be the team's Project Manager! I was drawn to the team by the passion of everyone working on the car, and I'm excited to push the team even further! I'm so lucky to have access to so many talented upcoming engineers, and I can't wait to provide them the chance to build their skills making NFR26.

Outside of Formula, I love to play guitar and find new music, as well as work on personal electrical projects!