The team has been hard at work over spring break preparing the car for testing. The brand new electrical system is close to completion, and mechanical changes are being made, too.
Here are some of the things we have been working on in closer detail:
The electrical system boards have been assembled, and are currently being tested for any bugs or defects before they get installed in sc5’s battery box.The new modular board system, shown on the right, will make replacing or making changes to components of the electrical system much easier. This is a cable of temperature sensors, each spaced out 3 inches from one other. The full cable has 8 temperature sensors. 4 such cables will run along our battery box, giving us 32 temperature points for our BPC (battery protection circuit).A comparison between our old and new temperature sensor boards. The new system’s boards are small enough to be mounted inside the battery box, making installation much easier.We are also improving driver controls. Here is a photo of our new steering wheel control panel. An LCD will be installed in the rectangular gap on top, providing the driver information about speed, battery life remaining, and other data.
The panel is made out of laser-cut acrylic. Here is a video of the laser cutting process. We placed a piece of acrylic into the laser cutter, input a CAD file of our panel to the laser cutter’s computer, made some adjustments, and then the cutter precisely created all the holes and cuts necessary. This video is of an earlier draft, without rounded center edges.
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