Solar Car Club » Car

Pictures from chassis testing and Halloween Parade

CrazyTurtle — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:53:35 +0000

Halloween Parade Pics

The Parade was a great time. =)

Chassis Testing Pics

~Also a good time =)

There are a bunch of viodes of the tests on Youtube, the following videos are of the slalom, figure 8, and brake testing respectivley:

Homecoming Game

CrazyTurtle — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:50:21 +0000

Here are a few pics from the homecoming football game this past Saturday. =)

6/21/2010 Meeting Notes

ahelton — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:01:04 +0000

Hey all, we had a pretty good meeting Monday, and we have decided to go forward with the solar resource makeover. For those who don’t know this car, here’s a picture:

With this in mind we need to start booking it. But first things first.

we need to get the formula car teams frame (which we are going to base our design off of since their frame is very very similar to this car design. We will modify it to be lighter and fit our uses.
We need to put this car into inventor or abacas and do simulations. We MUST test if this car will tip in the figure 8 and the slalom. If it does, modify the wheel placements until it no longer tips.
Not required but we need to check cross winds to see if it will lift us like a leaf in a gentle breeze.
Once the frame is close to being finalized we need to get a model of the body done. I would like both a 3D model as well as a real world model, out of clay, wood, whatever so we can put it in a wind tunnel and see what it does first hand. The body should be tweaked from the original to provide the least amount of drag. This goes for our solar pannels in the back, we need to design them as aerodynamic as possible.
We are confirming with andy and steve that the gumstix driver support system will be the way to go. We are confirming that it will do everything we want it to do (we are pretty sure it will) this will give us a really neat LCD on the steering wheel for all of our driver functions.
The battery pack is getting redesigned to be more modular (which is what i wanted it to be in the beginning but you know how that goes) The world solar challenge only allows 22kg of lithium-poly batteries, so our current pack won’t do since its setup for 25kgs. We have enough batteries to make a 2nd 22kg pack so i’m working on redesigning that. Please let me know if anyones interested in helping with that.
The world solar challenging also has limited us to 3 m^2 of GaAs cells. thats not very much. This is one reason why we decided to go with the more modular design.
The water proofing on the old car is about finished, we also have panel stands installed. Just a few more things and the old car will be ready to go. Please let me know if you have time and want to finish the car up.

This summer has been fairly productive, lets keep it that way. I would like to thank everyone who came to the meeting and offered their input. I will schedule another meeting soon on a Friday or Saturday so some of our working members can join in and the discussion.

Solar Cell Data

ahelton — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:48:15 +0000

Those of you who were supposed to check the current of the solar cells, the sr. design team took care of it. To prove it here’s a wonderful graph of current vs. voltage. This graph shows that the solar cells are current sources.

Yay Carbon Fiber!

Dustin Sanders — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:45:38 +0000

http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-methods-for-molding-fiberglass-and-carbon-f/

This is a great article on instructables that descibes how to work with carbon fiber, specifically how to build molds for it. Those of you who are interested in working on the body might wanna take a look at it.

microcontroller made for charging li-ion

Dustin Sanders — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:34:10 +0000

http://www.atmel.com/products/avr/bm/default.asp?family_id=607