First and foremost, the Solar Car Reveal Event on June 7th will officially begin at 4 pm. But at 3 PM, the car will be available to look at and the team will be ready to show it to you! The address of Raisbeck Aviation High School is 9229 E Marginal Way S, Tukwila WA […]
Last week, our team mounted and wired the six solar panels on top of the car’s solar panel rack! This major milestone is what makes our car solar! Each panel is laye on top of an aluminum panel rack that provides structural support to each panel. The rack is attached to the car with two […]
A lot of wires are necessary to make an electric car operate – we need to connect the battery, motor controller, motor, solar panels, MPPTs (Maximum Power Point Trackers, which are used to optimize power output of the solar panels), shutoff switches, relays, and more! To safely wire everything up, we first created a detailed […]
As with any street legal car, there needs to be light indicators so that drivers are able to see what that car’s driver is doing. So for our car, while headlights are not necessary, stop and turn lights are required by the rules, so that our unfortunate driver doesn’t end up getting rammed for not […]
For our solar car, there are many requirements that we need to meet, and the many more needs to reach optimal performance with our vehicle. We need to design a rear-view camera system, telemetry displays, and a system control panel. In order to accomplish this, we will be using an array of Raspberry Pi B+ […]
An integral part of dealing with lithium ion batteries is having a battery management system (BMS). The purpose of this is to balance the cells (or sets of cells) in series to ensure while charging/de-charging the load is consistent across the whole battery. We are using a BMS which includes an android app to monitor […]
We have been assembling photovoltaic cells into arrays and laminating them with a variety of techniques in order to understand the impact on cell efficiency. We are experimenting with 156 mm x 156 mm Sunpower cells and are covering them with heat activated lamination plastic. Recently, we found that the best way to ensure good […]
We decided to make our car for the Solar Car Challenge’s Advanced Division, so we are allowed to use other batteries, such as Lithium-Ion Batteries, in our car instead of deep-cycle Lead-Acid batteries. Though it does make the design more complicated, this different battery technology has many benefits for our car. Due to the Lithium-Ion […]
