Race-Car PCB Repack

The problem

Nittany Motorsports is Penn State’s Formula SAE team — students designing and building a real race car. I’m on the electronics team, hardware subdivision, and the problem I inherited is one every hardware engineer eventually meets: a board that’s electrically fine and mechanically wrong.

Previous iterations of one of the car’s PCBs didn’t fit its enclosure properly. Connectors landed where the housing wanted a wall, tall components fought the lid, and the assembly only went together with the kind of persuasion you don’t want anywhere near race-day electronics — on a car that vibrates for a living.

Reverse-engineering the constraints

The fix starts away from the schematic. Before moving a single footprint, the job was building a complete picture of what the enclosure actually demands:

• Keep-out zones — where the housing walls, standoffs, and lid features are, in board coordinates
• Height map — which regions allow tall components (capacitors, connectors) and which sit under low clearance
• Connector reality — where the harness physically arrives at the enclosure, which dictates where connectors must be, not where the layout would like them
• Mechanical environment — this box lives on a race car; vibration and serviceability in the paddock are requirements, not nice-to-haves

Photo pending — enclosure-fit.jpg

The lesson underneath: a PCB isn’t a 2D document. It’s a 3D part of a mechanical assembly, and the earlier layout treated the enclosure as someone else’s problem.

Re-placing components in KiCad

With constraints mapped, the actual work happened in KiCad: redesigning component placement so the board, the enclosure, and the wiring harness agree.

Photo pending — kicad-before-after.jpg

The placement pass balanced three things at once:

1. Component clearance — tall parts moved into the enclosure’s generous zones, nothing fighting the lid
2. Mechanical constraints — mounting holes, standoff contact areas, and keep-outs respected as hard rules in the layout
3. Packaging — connectors repositioned to meet the harness where it enters, improving how the whole electronics package integrates into the car

Fit check

The verification loop runs between the board model and the enclosure: export the board, check it against the housing, find the interference, adjust, repeat — before anything gets fabricated. Every conflict caught in CAD is a respin the team doesn’t pay for.

Photo pending — board-in-enclosure.jpg

What’s next

The work is ongoing — the placement redesign continues through fabrication, assembly, and the real test: the board living inside a vibrating, hot, occasionally airborne race car through a competition season.

What I’d already do differently: start every board from the enclosure, not the schematic. The mechanical envelope should be the first thing in the layout file — the entire fitment problem existed because it wasn’t. It’s the same lesson my handheld console taught me from the other direction, where the enclosure was designed around the electronics. The two have to be designed together.