Thank you Evergreen Solar for supporting our team!

The team now looks forward to a Soldering Party this weekend to prepare our cells for encapsulation. We will soon have our Solar Power for our car!

A project flow chart, and project timeline have been finished, and project plan assignments were handed out to assigned task leaders. The task leaders worked hard the first couple weeks to finish their project plans. We are all ready and waiting to be able to buy the materials to build each system.  In the mean time, we have been cutting the male foam replica of the body, which is step one of the body process, have built a battery box for the batteries, fixed the parking brake on the old car, and have been making our float for the parade.

The team has also participated in many community events so far. We visited Culvers with the car, and talked to a variety of people, young and old. We worked the family Casino night at the school to raise money as well.

The team also entered the SIUE annual Chili cookoff, and our solar chili won the hottest chili contest. (it wasn’t even entered in that category)

We are currently looking forward to Sunday, where we will bring the solar car to a Trunk or Treat event, and monday, we will be in the Edwardsville/Glen Carbon Halloween Parade. We chose the theme of Wile E. Coyote.

As far as work progress, we thank Evergreen Solar for donating EVA film, Solar Glass, and Taiflex substrate, for the encapsulation of our solar cells.

As soon as we order our materials, the BPS will be programmed, the windshield will be made, the array will be encapsulated and installed, the body project will be able to move to step 2, and the electrical systems will be able to start coming together. It will be a fun month of building =)

2010-2011 Solar Car Chassis Senior Design team-Michael P Graham, Grant Irvine, Schott Guehne, Troy Howell.

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Spindles (below)

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:

**Good News:

1. Mikes senior design group is making headway and is on schedule with design work.

2. Last i heard the plans for the Buffalo Wild Wings eat-to-earn-money thing is going to work out, but we do not have a firm date scheduled to my knowledge.

3. DONT forget, the rams game concession stand training is THIS WEDNESDAY at the Edward Jones Dome from 6-9.   I believe that we are meeting at 5pm or so and we will all car pool down there in our SIUE BIG BLUE VAN.   If you want to be able to attend rams games with us later in the year (and you do) you have to go through training.  SO bring a friend, girlfriend, parent, or even a stranger because this is a good money maker, its fun, and it gives YOU volunteer service hours.

4. its almost the end of October which means that we will hopefully be getting h use of our workshop back SOON.  When we do, i want to have a WORK meeting where we all get out to the shop and clean that place up!

**Updates and To Do’s:

1.Halloween Parade this Sunday, Oct 31st!  We are walking in the Edwardsville parade with the car.  Before that happens we need to paint new stuff on the sides of the car, it needs to say “Sponsor Us!”, “http://www.ee.siue.edu/~solar”  and id like to have a phone number or email address on there too.   Were also going to throw out some candy so people like us too.  It would be cool to have little buisness card thins to tape to the candy but we dont have to do that.

…..For the parade, we need to decorate the car so its not so boring too. Maybe some spider webs and a scarecrow or something.  Also, im not sure what we should wear to the event yet either.  We could either wear Halloween costumes or our nice solar car uniforms.

2.Mike thinks it would be a good idea for us to start a monthly flier to show interested people our progress.  We could just make it a word document and save it as a pdf and email it to people, because that’s free!  The flier doesn’t have to be anything crazy, just include about 2 new pictures and about a page of recent events.

3.We need to contact  mall’s ASAP and ask if we can bring our car into their mall or near an entrance on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving).  Ask for a free or reduced  price admission to do this.   Start by contacting the highest traffic malls like the galleria and St Claire Square and work your way down to Alton Square Mall until you get a YES.  Doing this will get us some attention and i bet well sell a LOT of CFL’s and some adopt-a-cells

4. This is important but the above stuff is more time critical, Mike thins it would be a good idea to organize a Trivia Night fundraiser.  It probably wouldn’t be that hard and im sure it would be worth our time from a monetary standpoint.

5. today (10-25) we got the car pretty much completely reassembled minus the bumper and side body panels.

**Other News:

1.  We found out that the 2012 ASC regulations require us to use silicon solar cells.  This is bad because we have been anticipating using higher efficiency Gallium Arcenide Cells which we also had a good deal coming to us on though ebay.   Now we may have to increase the surface area of our solar panel array to 6m^2 instead of 3m^2.   This changes our plans for the solar array support platform and the weight distribution of the car.

2. we still dont have a TIG welder lined up to use, for certain yet.  (we dont need it until December 14th though)

Everyone wishing to participate must get training, i sent everyone the list last week, please mark your calendars to see if you can go to one of them.  I’m still trying to get someone to come to the school like last year.  I know that would be easier for most everyone. I’ll keep everyone updated if i hear anything about that.

We filled out the paperwork for Buffalo wild wings fundraising, lets hope that works out well, we’ll ask for volunteers when more info comes available.  I would ultimately like everyone make some effort to stand somewhere on campus and hand them out. It would be good to try to coordinate times and where.  But we can talk about that when the times comes.

We are going to build a spot welder here in the next few weeks to gear up for the new battery pack.  I came up with a great idea (i hope) that will make the construction of the battery pack relevantly simple, cheap and easy to swap batteries (all 3 of the criteria for our team ) More on that as design is finalized.

Mechanical team talked in depth about the design of the chassis specifically starting with the wheels.  There has been some debate and ideas on what to do about the rims.  For now we will assume we will use the same rims as we do now (probably steal the spares to make sure everything works if we havn’t gotten them in.  I also found a really expensive alternative (1500 a rim) http://www.ghcraft.com/shops/cfw/cfw_e.htm these are the rims standford are using.  So if anyone finds a good cheap rim we could use for the car (14-16″ light weight rims).  Maybe we can just design our own =).  (only 1/2 kidding).

The tests were done on the old car to get our baseline complete.  She’s a tough little car.  I’ll let Mike post the results from that as well as his comments on each test and how its gonna effect the design.

Amy will have pictures and videos up when she gets time.