Shouzer

The ChallengeX competition finished up last Thursday. We ended up getting 10th overall which I was pretty happy with considering we didn’t have our first test until 3am the night before it shipped. We had a few little Dur-Dee-Dur’s that cost us some pretty big points as well, but I really didn’t care how well we finished. The biggest mistake was when someone forgot to put the fuse back in for the engine cooling fan which resulted in our engine overheating in two of the major events. We also had some major problems with our transmission leaking and breaking down. On the up side though, we did well enough that GM is going to give us a new transmission-electric motor combo so we shouldn’t have those problems next year. The thing they are giving us is pretty sweet. It has two electric motors and a transmission to tie them together with the engine. Plus, it has a 2 speed transmission in it as well, so it sort of has 2 transmissions. It’s kind of hard to explain without getting into some major jargon. Basically though, it will replace our 2 electric motors and our homemade transmission plus give us two speeds instead of one. All of this in a package about the size of one of our current electric motors. Oh, and I forgot to mention that is has more power than our current setup. They originally did not want to give it to us because they thought it would give us too much of advantage over other teams, but I guess we got enough people pulling strings for us that it finally went through.

I had to give three presentations on the last day of the competition. The control strategy presentation, given by me and one other guy, was the biggest point event of the competition. They had 13 corporate big-wigs in this room trying to rip holes in our presentation. I felt pretty exhausted afterward, but I guess we did decently because we got 6th place in that. I also gave 2 presentations for sponsor awards, National Instruments and Freescale. I gave the NI talk basically myself although there was a short demo by another guy, and the prof wrote a paper that we had to submit beforehand. We got 2nd place and $750 for that. I was pretty happy with that. The Freescale award was a disaster. We tried to Captain Planet it by having 4-5 guys talk about different stuff. They were not impressed, but to be honest I don’t even know why we tried to do it. We hardly used there stuff at all. So they ripped us a new one.

I started my new job in Detroit last Monday. I finally got a computer on Friday afternoon. I have yet to get a GM user/pass or the software I need to do the work they want me to do. I didn’t do any real work until Thursday at which point I started assisting the guy I’m going to work with. I basically just made some cables and connectors. That was good because I did not know how to do any of that stuff, and he taught me some good tricks. I was transferred to a new position the week before I came here, and they did not tell me until I got here. Honestly though, what I am doing now sounds basically like what they said I would be doing. I am working in a different location than I thought I would be though, Pontiac instead of Warren.

I am going to be working on a controller for a piece of equipment that tests seat belt anchorages. It sounds like a pretty decent assignment. The department where they do the testing is pretty cool. They have a bunch of hydraulic machines set up to do tests like that on various parts of the car. For instance, there is a machine that slams the doors on the car repeatedly to test the latches. They had big machines that shake the chassis, powertrain, suspension, etc. to see how they will hold up under road conditions. The idea is they take the car out on the test track and get real drive cycles, and then they bring the parts into this lab to test them under the same drive cycle to get repeatable test conditions.

My apartment is really nice. It is a 2 bedroom/2 bath with walk in closets in both rooms, huge overstuffed suede couches, fully furnished kitchen including dishwasher, and washer/dryer. My roommates are pretty cool as well. They thought I was coming in about 3 weeks ago so they were pretty shocked when I showed up. Two of them were gone home last weekend, and the other one came in about 3:30am Saturday night to find me sleeping in his bedroom in the spare bed. I guess he was a little freaked out. The area around the apartment is pretty upscale as well so it should work out well.