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 […]
