This Berkeley Solar Car Team Is Building More Than a Vehicle
Berkeley Solar Car Team engineering director Calvin Lee is developing a blockchain-based system that uses digital twins and the XRP Ledger to preserve engineering knowledge across student generations. His research with Berkeley's Center for Digital Assets aims to improve design documentation, collaboration, and long-term knowledge transfer for engineering teams.
Inside CalSol’s plan to put engineering memory on the blockchain
Calvin Lee (Chemistry and Computer Science ’27) spends his days attending classes and tutoring chemistry students. He moonlights as a race car driver.
Lee, who was last year’s engineering director of CalSol, Berkeley’s solar-powered vehicle club, has been involved for the past three years in designing and building cars from scratch—and racing them. Last summer, Lee traveled with CalSol’s generation 10 vehicle, Excalibur, to Kentucky for the Formula Sun Grand Prix, where student-built solar cars race for eight hours a day.
The Missing Blueprint
Midway through the competition, Excalibur’s rear suspension failed. “That pretty much ended our race,” Lee tells me, calling in from Berkeley, where he is spending the summer working on this year’s CalSol vehicle and his Center for Digital Assets (CDA) research project. Rebuilding the part in the fall, Lee and his team wanted to revisit the original design decisions to understand why they had been made.
But because the creators of Excalibur’s rear suspension graduated, taking with them that documentation, Lee and his team were left guessing.
Engineering’s Memory Problem
That experience convinced Lee that the hardest part of student engineering isn’t always building the car: it’s preserving the knowledge behind it. His CDA research explores whether blockchain and digital twins can solve that problem. Lee’s project aims to use blockchain to make engineering design data easier to verify, manage, and transfer. He and his research partner, Soham Kulkarni (EECS ’29), plan to do this by linking digital twins to a tamper-resistant record of project development.
“The goal of this project,” Lee says, “is to make sure everyone can see where the car is at, but also build infrastructure [for] knowledge transfer between generations.”
Design, On Chain
“What we’re building is a permanent history of all the engineering decisions we make and a way to track those decisions with a system that we already have in place.” In Lee’s system, blockchain provides the tamper-resistant record behind that history, preserving not only files, but also who created them, when they were created, and how the project evolved over time. Lee says the team chose the XRP Ledger because it creates a tamper-resistant record of engineering activity.
“The XRP Ledger will create a permanent uneditable record of whatever we want,” Lee says. That allows future team members to identify who designed a component, understand why key decisions were made, and even reach out to the alumni behind them.
Talking about the part that broke in last summer’s race, Lee points out, “If [the project] was already implemented, then when the rear suspension was designed, it would have been committed and documented: why we chose a certain material, why the part was a certain thickness at different parts. And last year when it broke,” he continues, “we would be able to look at that and say, ‘Okay, this is what happened. This is how the rear suspension was simulated. And now we know exactly why.’”
Beyond CalSol
Lee envisions the platform extending far beyond CalSol. He and Kulkarni plan to integrate the project history with a public dashboard that shows what the state of CalSol’s cars is at any time. “This architecture could [also] turn into a workflow that companies use…[with] the same goal of improving knowledge transfer with integration between different systems that already exist.”
For Lee, projects like this wouldn’t exist without organizations willing to invest in undergraduate research. “CDA present[s] opportunities to students,” Lee says, adding that the organization made this research possible. “I believe student teams are important for learning,” Lee adds. “Any donation to teams like us is aiding that learning and giving more opportunities for students to grow.”
What Future Teams Inherit
“If everyone graduated tomorrow,” Lee tells me, “it would be a mess.”
Lee hopes his research will make that scenario far less daunting. Rather than relying on institutional memory, future generations of engineers could inherit a living record of every major design decision.
“Our job,” Lee says, “is to figure out how the technology will interact with the team.”