The Car Works!

Hello everyone, big news for the team this week.  After much testing and troubleshooting the R/C solar car finally works under its own power! Most of the delay was due to the weather being so poor that the team could not bring the car outside for proper full spectrum testing. Finally the Upper Peninsula got a stretch of warm, cloud free weather where the team could go outside and run the car without plowing through snow. Now that the proof of concept has…well… been proven, the goal is to extend the array with our left over cells and invest in a couple full spectrum lamps so that we can demonstrate the car inside at recruiting events and shows. Perhaps I can get a good video posted on the website in the future but no promises.

On top of the ecstasy brought on by the success of our R/C car the team has also moved very close to meeting our goal of having the full shell and chassis modeled by this next weekend. Obviously there will be adjustments over time as we merge the two together and find that pieces simply don’t fit. But the models have been set up so that alterations can happen as smoothly as possible. At this time the team can share, fairly confidently, the dimensions and shape of the shell and the layout of the chassis. At the same time the team has been developing a few models in Mat lab for various aspects of the car in an initial attempt to optimize some of our choice design features. The features modeled include the aerodynamic resistance of our car in terms of power loss based on speed of travel, how the latitude, longitude, and height above sea level affect the power generation of our array, and our steering angle as a function of wheelbase and desired turn radius to name a few. Eventually the team would like to model how our car will run on the actual race course and optimize for those conditions.

Finally the team has been working with the University continuously to identify target alumni who may be interested in our project. So hopefully by next week the team will be able to start sending out our alumni brochure and information on our Adopt-A-Cell program. I will see if we can get that information up on our website soon and post a link here for you generous readers to support us.

I hope you all have a great week as always.

~Dan