With 60 more days until race day, time is ticking to make strategies, fix errors in our data, and get closer as a team. While the pressure on us builds, this just means that getting everything prepared is at utmost importance.

In preparation, our team meets every Tuesday afternoon to talk about what needs to be done and what we can do today. One thing that is always on the list is making sure that all of our members are prepared to talk about what they have been working on the past 1-2 years. Now all we do isn’t just planning about Texas; we also have been having fun playing trivia games to see who knows the rule book best and playing murder mystery. 

Although we might be at our last stages, we are still strategizing about what we should do on the raceway. This requires us to look at the data that the car collects and sends to Garfana, a visualization tool of what’s happening to the car. As SOCKEYE drives we measure out the speed of the car in relation to how much power we use, which tells us the optimum speed should go at to ensure that we would have enough power for the rest of the race.

But this only tells us one part of the story; the other half is the collection of power (Solar irradiance tracked by SolCast) over time, which can tell us how much power we are able to receive. However, this changes over time, meaning the graph isn’t the same for each hour. We also need to account for us moving our solar panels up at a 90-degree angle for charging, so we have to account for the gain of power when we move the panels up and down for the beginning of the day, the race, and the end of the day. 

Overall, even when it seems that it was the final part of the race, it’s still one of the biggest projects we need it done and refined as we get ready to head to Texas for the raceways.