Full Moon Night

By Bertyc @bertyc

It’s been another long day. But I didn’t expect much else. We rose to sunrise coming than expected and did all our work this morning. This made for a busy morning. Car had to be shuttled to a tree free area for charging, while the camp had to be taken down and breakfast served.
We were still having issues with the battery and BPS – Ryan and Shawn found a potential problem area - kill switch. That’s part of the new rules this year – you need an external kill switch for the car that isolates the batteries, This switch had a lose wire which may have been a problem. It has been secured and we’ll see performance tomorrow.
We had another flat tire in the rear today – with some slightly similar steering effects to when we had the crash on the track. This time though the tire went flat slowly – not instantly. In this instance, the motor was in constant torque mode where as with the crash it was in constant speed. Constant speed is more efficient but can lock up the motor like when we had the rear blowout. Constant torge is safer, so we opted to go that way.
The weather was much more pleasant today. Sunny all day with no clouds – but also a little cooler. We peaked at about 1600 watts. I’ve posted this power graph to show you what we generate. The middle curve is during our driving time with the outside lines being our charge time. That’s when the array is off the car and perpendicular to the sun.
I’ve also uploaded something from our Geo team. They plotted our speed and location as we were on the test track at hidden valley. Small green dots are slower, large red oes are faster.