C-ITS Demonstrator
Award-winning connected-driving demonstrator. Live dashboard, MQTT, 3D.
- Role
- Mechanical build, 3D printing, assembly, maintenance, dashboard & MQTT
- When
- 2025 – 2026
- Stack
- MQTT, JavaScript, Three.js, Raspberry Pi 5, ROS 2
Breakdown
Connected and automated driving, where cars talk to the road around them, is hard to show and hard to teach. Real demos need expensive hardware, and school projects usually end as a folder of files nobody can rebuild.
- Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is invisible without a demo
- Teaching it needs something you can touch and watch live
- Most diploma projects cannot be rebuilt by anyone else
ESD Car 2.0: a fully self-built model car with a 3D-printed chassis, custom circuit boards, a Raspberry Pi 5 running ROS 2 and a Pi Pico. On our demonstrator track it talks to the infrastructure over MQTT, with a construction-site warning on a sign gantry, position tracking through magnet points and live telemetry. I built the car mechanically and owned 3D printing, part assembly and maintenance, and I also built the live dashboard and the MQTT connection.
- Mechanics: 3D-printed chassis, differential gearbox, assembly and upkeep
- Live dashboard: speed, RPM, section times, animated track and 3D model
- Encrypted cloud MQTT broker with reliable delivery for control commands
- Complete DIY bundle so other schools can rebuild it
Built
- Bosch Innovationspreis 2026, special prize in the ACE-Challenge category, out of 80 diploma projects from 27 HTL schools
- Public site live with the dashboard, a learning environment with quiz and flashcards, the build manual and a 3D part finder
- DIY bundle: 8 setup guides, 40+ mechanical parts, 4 custom PCBs, 5 ROS 2 packages
- Redeploys automatically from GitHub to Cloudflare on every push
Not yet
- The public dashboard runs on simulated data unless you connect your own MQTT broker
How it works
The car is 3D printed, assembled and kept running between test drives.
The car sends RPM and lane data and detects magnet points A, B and C on the track.
Messages go through an encrypted cloud MQTT broker over TLS and WebSockets.
The browser dashboard shows telemetry, section times, the live track and a 3D model.
The dashboard switches the construction-site warning on the sign gantry.