Welcome back BBQ Pics

JESC had their 2010 BBQ for all the engineering students yesterday.  Competing teams were encouraged to show their projects, so of course the solar car team was there.  We also had a reporter from the Alestle there interviewing members for the article that came out today.

Team Photos!

We couldn’t get everyone together at once, so we got 2 pictures.  Even got the Dean in one of them!

9/17/2010 Meeting Notes

Very productive meeting last Friday.  Went over the projects that needed to get started ASAP.

Projects are:

FUNdraising:

• JESC
  • Update Powerpoint
  • Update Written proposal
  • Update Budgets.  Need a separate Tool Budget
  • Tool budget is communal for all school teams
  • WE want a new TIG welder with that budget
• IEEE
  • Oct 1st meeting
  • Make short presentation
  • Written proposal mostly done
• Parade
  • Research all available parades that we could walk in
  • Find Companies to offer our advertising services to
  • Make Offers to wear shirts, wear signs, and paint side of car

Electrical:

Mechanical:

Twitter

SIUE now has a twitter account, this will get updated as we progress though our project.

Welcome Back!

JESC Meeting/Other Updates

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!

First Meeting of the Semester!

The meeting will be in room 1027 in the Engineering Building at 1:00 pm this Friday, Sept 10th .   Old, new, and prospective  members are all welcome to attend.

PayPal Donations

FYI, the paypal donation button on the right isn’t working at the moment. I’m working on resolving the issues paypal is having. Hopefully this will be working within a few days.

UPDATE: PayPal has been fixed. Donation link is now working. Thanks for your patience.

Adopt-A-Cell Form

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

Meeting Notes 8-6-10

>On Friday evening we had a good turn-out of members, Thanks guys!  We discussed the logistics of shipping the solar car and ourselves to Australia.  Were hoping to get the support of airline companies or the air-force in the form of free or reduced-price tickets.  Either way we will still need a LOT of money!  For the actual race we will need a BARE minimum of 6 people to effectively race (more would be much better!)
>We talked about changing the car design a little.  If we made the body around the vehicle cockpit extend farther back onto the car and eliminate the seam between the panels and the cockpit, we will reduce our aerodynamic drag (note that the car we are basing our design off of does this)   Other minor body shape changes were discussed to improve aerodynamics.  If we dont go too wild with this, we could greatly improve the performance of our car while only making it slightly harder to manufacture.
>We are SOOO close to finishing the old car.  The list of issues we came up with is as follows:

*Add 3 members to cockpit frame to meet regulations, AND finish welding the roll-cage to the body.
*Repair and attach windshield
*Water Proof the Car- (almost done with this!)
*Meet Fastener spec. criteria (Almost done with this!)
*Vehicle HORN – It is already assembled, but the car bumper will need to be altered to install it
*Vehicle impact analysis-this is quite a project, if you are interested in being TAUGHT how to use 3D modeling and impact analysis programs (so you can help him), contact Mike (migraha@siue.edu)
*Sell advertising space on side of car
*Build the battery holders for batteries (they are already designed and a prototype is underway)

Also, we have a cool new stand-alone team poster that you will be able to see in the EB Atrium by the time school starts!