On August 19th of last year, literally days before the car shipped off across the Pacific Ocean, SunPower courteously invited us to an ice cream social event they were having at Richmond their office to wish Impulse bon voyage. We were very honored to be there and extremely surprised to be welcomed by nearly 200 SunPower employees with some overwhelming enthusiasm (which we really loved)!
I’d like to give some huge props to Alyssa Newman, our amazing host who worked out the schedule and made this event possible! On top of the amazing event, Alyssa also gave us a comprehensive factory tour which taught the team more about solar cell manufacturing techniques and some state-of-the-art solar cell technologies in general.
SunPower later donated an used Spire SPI-Array Tester 800 to us to bring Down Under. We used the array tester extensively while debugging our solar arrays and working on our MPPT optimization code in Darwin, and we were so fortunate to have this wonderful piece of equipment with us and be able to regularly check on the performance of our slowly deteriorating solar cells.
We realize that this post is coming up a little late, but it’s better late than never and we would really like to thank SunPower for their hospitality and support. So thank you, SunPower, for being incredibly generous and we look forward to some further collaboration in the near future soon.