Need for Speed

The Bolt team at Virginia Tech has built a high-performance all-electric racing motorcycle and used Qt to create its equally powerful dashboard. Bolt chose Qt because of how fast and easy it is to iterate on the dashboard that was used to test, debug and monitor the health of the system throughout the process.

The BOLT team created a great-looking UI using Qt Quick's drag-and-drop design tool and readymade UI controls. The Qt Quick Compiler compiled the QML source code into the final binary which reduced boot time significantly.

Dashboard built with Qt

The dashboard is the heart of the motorcycle. It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 and displays two different screens: One for racing and one for debugging. The racing screen displays the battery charge state with a gauge that changes colors at low levels, as well as RPM by way of a gauge that mimics a motor torque curve. The debug screen provides error messages that are useful for debugging the powertrain.

 Racing Screen 

• Motor RPM
• Battery state of charge
• Soon to be lap times

Debug Screen

• Battery voltages/currents
• Motor temperature
• Battery temperature
• Motor torque