It is finished
Thursday morning was my last final. I finished up with it around 11am, and went directly to work on ChallengeX. Around 3:30am Thursday night, we took the ‘Nox out for the first road test ever. I was riding shotgun as we drove down Wabash Ave (45 mph speed limit) at 72mph with no headlights. The car performed amazingly, especially in high speed charging mode, in which we drive >40mph and charge the 360V battery at the same time. The car drags a little between 0-50, but it hauls from 50-70. We lost the vehicle tailing us when we did the 50-70 test that night. Afterwards, we went for the mandatory celebratory trip to IHOP. I got home that morning around 6am, took a shower and a 1.5hour nap. Then, we reconvened to prep the ‘Nox for shipping. That’s right, we did our first road test 7 hours before shipping it. Not something I would highly recommend btw. I would have liked to have had more time for testing, but this makes for a totally cool story.
While I’m talking about ChallengeX, I have to tell you about this guy on the team named Tom. Tom is 2nd in command of the Fab team, which means he puts all of the mechanical stuff in the car, and he was instrumental in the design/building of our custom transmission. Anyway, Tom pulled an all-nighter Wednesday night fabbing up a new driveshaft. (We sheared the bolts on our previous one). He showed up 45 minutes late to his 8am final, and then left about an hour later. Edit: I was also in this final, and it took me around 3 hours. He told me later that he only needed to get a 55% on it so he wasn’t trying hard. End Edit Then, he proceeded to return to work on ChallengeX. Around 11-12 that night, he got bored because we were doing some electrical/controls testing. So he decided to build a little 5hp moped. It took him like 30 minutes. The guy is insane. He ended up staying up for like 50 hours straight, working on ChallengeX almost the whole time.
Today, I moved into my new place in the Haute. That went pretty smoothly actually. On Tuesday, we’re flying our to Phoenix for the big testing competition. I’m really looking forward to it now that our car is fully functional. I was starting to dread it up to that night because I didn’t think we would finish. I believe I’ll have internet access there so I’ll try to post updates.
In other news, I had yet another hard drive replacement yesterday. Hooray Compaq! Actually, the hard drives are Hitachi so Hooray Hitachi!
kyle said:
May 28, 06 at 9:24 amyou tell better stories now compared to high school.
nick said:
May 28, 06 at 9:28 pmsounds like you’ve been busy!
Anonymous said:
May 29, 06 at 10:02 amI have better material than I did in high school.
I have been extreemely busy. I’m looking forward to this summer when I will only have to work 40 hour weeks.
jared said:
May 29, 06 at 1:15 pmsounds like good stuff, scottie. congrats on getting everything done for challengex. do you know what sort of gas mileage you get with it? and haha, have fun in phoenix. i just saw on the news that the high there tomorrow is 98 degrees. that sucks.
also, what’s the new place like? you livin alone or with some other ppl?
and the “hooray compaq, hoory hitachi” reminded me of those beer commercials. “hooray responsibility!”
scott said:
May 29, 06 at 5:01 pmWe haven’t gotten the chance to test the gas mileage yet. We’ll see when we perform that even. Our simulations say 35mpg, but I seriously doubt the accuracy of that.
I was trying to copy the beer comercials.
jared said:
May 30, 06 at 1:04 pmout of curiousity, how do you run simulations on mpg?
scott said:
May 31, 06 at 1:52 amWe have a mathmatical model of the car that we call the plant model and the controller which is the same type of code as the plant. We can put the two together, and give the plant vehicle inputs (like gas, brake) to simulate a drive cycle. I believe they base the simulation off an EPA drive cycle that is used for real MPG testing.
The controller and plant can also be seperated and run on seperate pieces of hardware. When we do this, we use real time hardware so that it simulates a real time model of the car. That is what I did over last summer. It’s pretty cool because you can drive with the same computer-based dashboard that goes in the car and see how it wll do in real life. We were actually supposed to integrate that with GTA for a real driving experience, but the CSes never finished their stuff.
After we got the plant and controller seperated and running properly, we started replacing parts of the plant with real components. First, we did the electric motors, then the battery, and finally the engine. That was what I did all year, although I didn’t do all of that work.
Today, we arrived in Phoenix, and the competition starts tomorrow. I’m starting to get pretty excited to see how our car will actually run. I’ll let you know.
jared said:
May 31, 06 at 1:54 pmsounds pretty good. good luck with it all. i’ll be curious to see how it turns out.