Hello CalSol supporters!
As the Data Lead of Electrical Team, I’d like to give you a little update on some amazing progress we have made recently and take the time to recognize the hardworking members of the team! As the name suggests, the Data Team is primarily responsible for anything data-related on the Electrical Team, although we are also in charge of the radio communication between the cars we are taking to the race. We consist of the Data Logger, Race Strategy and Telemetry Subteams, and we are totally awesome!
Wonder why we’re so awesome? I will start you off with some examples:
- We are a team of diligent enthusiasts of what we do!
- We meet our deadlines and complete our tasks with superb quality!
- We are an incredibly good-looking bunch!
In all seriousness, as a follow-up to our previous blog posts on our Data Logger and Telemetry System, we now have a working Data Logger and an improved Telemetry Viewer! For the Data Logger, although we are still yet to implement a user-friendly file system, we are proud to say that the Data Logger is complete on a raw-data-disk-access level. In other words, the Data Logger is able to write all the detected data into the SD card successfully at a decent speed. Our next goal is to implement a well-structured file system and optimize the writing speed. Congratulations to Richard Lin and Ken Cheng!
Regarding the Telemetry System, we have fixed some bugs on the Telemetry Viewer that we have run into last weekend. We even took one step further and implemented some nice features such as autoranging for plots and a naming system for the tabs of the program (yes, we can make tabs to organize our plots in our program!). We are currently working on the hardware protocol for multiple-packet processing on our Telemetry Board and some more exciting features for the Telemetry Viewer. Here, I’d like to acknowledge all those sleepless nights of hard work that Devan Lai, Kevin Morgan and Jimmy Wu have put in!
One of the newest subteams on CalSol, Race Strategy, has made some impressive progress in the past weeks as well. We are designing a new Race Strategy Program to help optimize our performance at WSC, and have spent some quality time researching Australian terrain and useful concepts for our performance model. Not only that, we have recently finished collecting valuable information on the unpredictable weather of Australia (thank you Australian Bureau of Meteorology!) in addition to compiling information on our very own solar cells and batteries. We have also discussed the implementation of Race Strategy Program in detail and have started working on the code collaboratively. I’d like to show my sincere gratitude towards William Chieng, Wesley Chow, Kevin Morgan, and Danny Tang for all their hard work so far! We have had lots of insightful discussions and I look forward to seeing more of their progress.
I’d also like to thank Ed Divita especially for his guidance and leadership! As some of you may recall, Ed was one of our team leads for the Formula Sun Grand Prix 2009 and has returned to Cal(Sol) for his M.S. in Environmental Engineering; he is now one of the team advisers and is actively involved with the Race Strategy Subteam. He took the initiative to start working on the performance model and introduced the structure of the Race Strategy Program. Ed has been a great help for the team and a great asset. I can’t thank him enough!
As I have mentioned earlier, the Data Team is full of wonderfully talented people and I am very humbled to be working with them. Like all the other teams, we have been working very hard to finish Impulse despite all the craziness happening at school. Please continue to support CalSol as we move towards our dream, goal, and a soon-to-be reality!
Go Bears!