New Members and German Cars

The team is back from our extended break. Everyone has dived into their Stanford classes and some of us already have midterm exams (sooo much fun!). After Australia many of our old members had reached the end of their time on solar car. Everyone has to graduate eventually, but we’ll still be sad to see them go. Rumor has it that a few of them may be back for their masters degrees, so we might have a new graduate student presence on the team next cycle.

During the winter break the team spent time preparing for our new member recruiting season. Our most important project was creating a repository of knowledge for teaching new members the art and science of building a solar powered race car. Today, we have an evolving manual of resources that will make the learning curve of applying classroom engineering to hands on application less steep. Our secret manual is full of best practices from the past cycle, failure analyses of previous cars, information about the tools and resources that our team uses, and descriptions about projects that new members can start working on. In the past it could be easy to get wrapped up in just one aspect of designing and building a solar car, but now all of our members can read up on any aspect of solar car design.

Once the school year actually started, our team started a campaign to recruit new members. So far, we have over a hundred new members that have signed up to learn more about our team. The majority are still coming back to our weekly meetings, so hopefully they’ll stick around for the long haul. One of our primary goals of the next few months is to on board new members as quickly as possible and to make sure that everyone picks up the fundamental skill sets that they need to design the next car and to run the team business. The team manual is teaching members the basics and then older members are hosting group and one-on-one training sessions with the new guys and gals. Members are quickly learning everything from lathe skills to working with Altium.

The team is also working on a number of logistical projects in preparation for the next design cycle. We are upgrading and expanding our server resources. We are reorganizing our facilities at VAIL. And we are working on sourcing more team computing resources so that anyone on the team can get involved in designing the next car even if they don’t own a personal computer with high powered graphics, CPUs, and RAM.

If you are an alumni who is on our mailing list, you may have heard that Xenith’s top shell was outside during a big wind storm and got picked up and blown across our parking lot. Surprisingly, the top shell looked pretty good for what it went through. A couple places needed carbon patching or epoxy, but now everything is smooth with Bondo and we are ready for some touch up paint. Our greatest surprise when we flipped the top shell over was that Xenith’s glass panels were almost entirely unscathed. We’ll want to swap out one or two panels that hit a mill vise or some other sharp object along the way, but the rest were fine. Our custom Corning glass is incredibly strong!

We also have new team leadership for the next cycle.

Greg is our new Engineering Lead
Nathan G. is our new Mechanical Lead
John is our new Electrical Lead
Forest is our new Composites Lead
Carole is our new Business Lead
Audrey will be our new Financial Lead
Paul C. is our new Programming Lead
Rachel is our new Embedded Software Project Manager
Bryant is our new Embedded Software Technical Lead
Wesley is the new overall Team Lead

The rest of the leadership roles will be fleshed out as we figure out everyone’s core interests on the team.

Our facilities at the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab on campus have a new TA named Nick. Usually TAs are reserved for academic classes, but VAIL and our team are fortunate enough to have someone assigned to work on the administrative tasks of making sure that our building runs smoothly. Nick is also a TA for the Stanford Product Realization Lab (AKA, the place where Stanford students invent and fabricate awesome products if they don’t work at VAIL), so we will probably pull him in occasionally when new members want some mentoring in the machine shop.

Yesterday, our team had a visit from our friends on the Bochum Solar Car Team. Bochum brought their car, SolarWorld GT, to visit Xenith and our team on their tour of the US and the rest of the world. Bochum has stepped beyond the solar car paradim of designing exclusively for speed and instead they have built a series of vehicles that are pushing solar car technology towards the realm of practical family vehicles. I’ll put up some pictures from my iPhone for now, but I know that our team has some group shots that ought to go up here soon. Bochum will be crossing the US through Texas and Florida. Check out their schedule to see if they will be driving past you. You should meet them to say hi.

There is a ton of stuff happening on our schedule over the next few months, so check back often!