Registration has been submitted and we are an official competitor in the 2019 High School Solar Challenge at the Texas Motor Speedway! Team members have been putting in hours after school and on the weekends to design and build the remaining components of the car, and complete registration details. The competition will take place July […]
Invigorated by our quick process and early completion of our 1 February deadline, we felt confident that we could have our car driving under battery power within weeks. Unfortunately, fate (or the weather) reared its ugly head as snowmageddon reigned in Seattle, with several feet aggregate of snow dumped on the city in just two […]
Since our last post we’ve been hard at work and a lot has happened. We’ve gone from CAD models to the testing track in the span of a couple weeks, and we are excited to keep moving forward towards competition. As July draws ever closer, the pressure and pace of work has increased dramatically. With […]
Our custom solar panels just arrived last week after much planning and preparation. The panels are semi-flexible and should be highly efficient, but their fragility means we can’t do much with them until we have a secure place to mount them for further testing. Consequently, we have begun to design the panel rack which will […]
As per the brake team’s last post, Starting to Stop, we are in the process of designing a brake pedal that will successfully actuate the calipers of the car, via steel brakes, once mounted to the suspension. In that post, we highlighted the pedal we would be mounting onto the levers by showing a screenshot of the […]
The team is hard at work since returning to school after Winter Break. Here’s what we’re up to! Cutting, welding, and more! We have started to cut parts for the suspension and chassis. Students are learning how to use different tools in the shop such as the horizontal band saw, table saw, and hand saws. […]
Brake Levers Since our initial post, we have acquired new brake levers that will likely be the final iteration of our cable design for the prototype car. The levers will be attached via steel brake cables to calipers mounted to the suspension. To pull the lever, we are manufacturing a unique pedal to place upon […]
The Solar Car Competition is a very ambitious and rigorous technical challenge with innumerable engineering hurdles to be overcome. This is especially for us, as we are a first-year team with little existing knowledge base to draw from. Therefore, it is invaluable to learn from the experiences of other high school teams who have come […]
Over the week-long break, we made several leaps in progress on our way to a working solar car. Since we have not competed in this competition before, it is paramount that we iterate our design as much as possible in order to artificially boost our team’s experience. Over the course of the winter break, several […]
Our new chassis design has taken a major shift in its compatibility with other parts and its aerodynamics. We have changed our chassis to be thinner to accommodate the change in the width of a human sitting down. At the bottom of the chassis, the inner width is 22 inches and its upper width is […]
