Hello everyone! Sorry to keep you in the dark during this past week… if you kept up with our facebook posts, you’d know that this past week was filled with a whole lotta fixing for our team.
The team arrived in Austin, TX with Zephyr that needed a lot of fixing. First of all, Scrutineering was set to start on Monday. Due to our need to fix our defective braking system as described in our previous blog post in addition to an exploded trailer tire, we arrived in Austin on late Monday afternoon to start scrutineering on Tuesday. We added new lights, replaced enclosures, designed temperature sensing system, made new boards, soldered a whole lotta everything, cut here and taped there. We re-did them twice, thrice, four times, as many times until we were ensured that faulty systems were fixed and that we can ensure the driver’s safety.
FSGP (Formula Sun Grand Prix) was set to start on Thursday, but we could not get on the track on Thursday because we still had consequential problems that needed to be debugged. In order to qualify for ASC, we must complete 60 laps in 1 day or 90 in two consecutive days. We decided to take our time to ensure that the problems were fixed for good before putting the car and the driver on a track race, to ensure the safety and performance of Zephyr and its driver.
Finally on Friday, we were able to get a good to go “green” sticker on all scrutineering stations– solar (modified our array size), body & sizing (installed new lights, modified enclosures, added rear view camera, added paddings), BPS (redesigned and implemented a new temperature sensing system), mechanical (added crumple zones), electrical (added electrical hazard labels), drivers (qualified Ellande, Nick, Aditya, and Aly to be our drivers), and dynamic testing.
Despite the troubles we went through fixing up Zephyr, it performed exquisitely well in dynamic testing. Aditya shocked the team when he zipped through slalom and figure 8 test in record time.
The team is so excited to get some time on the track race tomorrow. CalSol is team #6– wish us luck & abundant sunshines!
