Solar Car Club » Cougar Cruiser 9000

Chassis Progress!

MechEngineerMike — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:27:53 +0000

(Michael Graham) Hey guys sorry for the long wait on the new chassis pictures, the design just kept changing and getting better and better. After redesigning the hubs we were able to reduce their weight by 40%! The frame was redesigned and at the cost of an extra pound is much stronger than the previous frame design. The mechanical senior design team has also begin construction on the frame and control arms. Lots of parts have been shipped in and the mechanical senior design team is on track to complete the project by the third week of march, as planned. Additionally, through clever design, purchasing and parts & service donations by various companies, the team anticipates finishing up under budget

JESC Meeting/Other Updates

Dustin Sanders — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:48:54 +0000

JESC Meeting

Mike and I went to the first JESC (Joint Student Engineering Council) of the semester. They talked about when the power point presentation is due, who is doing cheap lunch and to talk about the Welcome back BBQ.

Nobi Emmanuel Funding Proposals:
The Date with Nobi is not set just yet (they think its Mid-October), however the 3 slides required are due October 1st, these slides need to contain:

Team Information
Competition Overview
Budget

We should try to include why its good for the school.

The Written Proposal will consist of:

Mission Statement
Team Overview
Competition Overview (WSC and ASC races)
Team Goals
Timeline (Mike has ours, we need to make it pretty and colorful)
2010-2011 Budget (Detailed and included Requested Support line, no idea what that menas)

We have 3 weeks to accomplish this, shouldn’t take long since we already have the proposal and slides from last year, all we have to do is update it slightly.

Other updates

I got an email from M2S Tech who has offered his companies affiliates to help, they offer a bunch of great stuff, take a look at their site when you get a chance.

Contacted Emcore about solar cell sponsorship, put everything in motion, hopefully we’ll get some nice cells donated to us.

Also Contacted Dow Kokam, a battery manufacturer about sponsorship for batteries for the new car.

We have also raised 420 dollar already from the Adopt-A-Cell program put into place last week, WOW! Head over to the Solar Cell Adoptee page to check out who they were.

That’s it for now, See everyone at the meeting tomorrow!

Adopt-A-Cell Form

Dustin Sanders — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:41:37 +0000

Hey Team, I have put together a form for the adopt-a-cell program. Feel free to give this to businesses, family members and friends you know. Depending on how many they adopt they get different perks.

1: Certificate and Name on the site
5: Team T-shirt
10: Name on the side of our trailer

Each tier gets the previous tier’s perk. Please pass the word

Adopt-a-cell Form

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.