On a hot Saturday morning CalSol hits the raceway. The team arrives in two shifts: the first one leaves at 7:30am to fix the canopy and finish wiring the dashboard. The second round of members sleeps in for an extra two hours in order to prepare for an intense day of coding.
Ryan has been working particularly hard and after waking up at 9:00am he needs iced coffee. The mission began and after a fruitless expedition for an open cafe we stopped at a Caltex station to load up on a variety of milk coffee drinks. These nine drinks are all for Ryan. Soon after receiving this coffee-load his coding began feverishly.
A few hours later, Impulse drove for the first time in Australia.
The team is working into the night to continue debugging the electrical systems. We ran into a few problems throughout the day. Impulse had an unintentional electrical connection between the battery’s negative terminal and the carbon fiber shell. We discovered that a loose USB cable leaving the battery box was touching the carbon fiber and creating a high electrical potential between the shell and the positive battery terminal. This was an easy fix for a mistake that never actually caused any problems. Great job to the team for being careful enough to find this problem (and don’t make this mistake again!). The car has a few more data and reliability problems that we hope to resolve tonight.
As day turned into night the team split in to two shifts for dinner. Just before Rafael left for his shift, he had an epiphany and jumped out of the car to explain to the team how to get over the next hurdle. A few more hurdles remain and we are doing everything we can to make it through scrutineering in a few days.