Thanks to the generosity of the folks at the Kangan Batman TAFE automotive training facility in northern Melbourne, we’ve spent the last two days prepping the car for the drive to Adelaide. We still have a lot of testing to do before we can call it ready, so we’re looking forward to getting miles on it in the drive up to Darwin.

Click here for more photos of the car (on my/nathans/DCs/marvins/matts trip blog)

Badged up

We’re at DB Schenker picking up the car. Nathan and Sasha are working on getting the van to start, after it was starved of petrol prior to shipping.

Solar car!

Still in one piece

Sasha just got off the phone with the shipping company- apparently neither customs nor quarantine wanted to even look in our container. This means that we should get both the car and the van as soon as they are unloaded from the boat, which should be by 2pm tomorrow (Tuesday 13th). This was basically our best case scenario, since the boat was delayed coming into dock. Great success.

America has a reputation for having dishonest multinationals and greedy corporations. It seems Australia is at least as bad.

Here in Melbourne there’s a shady car parking chain called “Care Park”. They operate lots with spots smaller than normal sized vehicles and with passageways too small to enter or exit spots with spotters on both sides. They also send out officers to check the spots right after the tickets expire, to increase their profits.

They chose to give us a ticket for one of our vehicles even though we bought a permit for that day. We had bought permits for the days before, and the days since. Despite having all of the documentation to prove that we had paid them their full amount, the refuse to drop the ticket. Why? Technically we were in breach of contract for failing to display our permit on the dashboard of one of our three vehicles.

As the race draws near and our audience becomes more Australian, I figure I should post this up in order to give the public an opportunity to have some moral justification for offering their business to competing parking services. The cost of the ticket isn’t a big deal, but the incredible greed and lack of respect are revolting.

We just got bad news from our shipping company. It seems that some bad weather has delayed our car’s arrival. While we might still get it in time for the race, it’s eating in tremendously on our testing time and increasing our cost of living.

If nothing else goes wrong we’ll be on the road on the 16th. We’ll see about that.

We had a fairly uneventful day in the city. Several of us headed off to the library to score some free bandwidth, doing everything from software development to video chat. We finally got around to designing our array stand, which I think someone on the team nicknamed SARS – the solar array repositioning system.

Our car should arrive in the port tomorrow, though it’s unclear when exactly customs will get around to letting us take delivery.

Oh, and I asked the Sanitarium company if they would be willing to sponsor us for 300 kilograms of Weet-Bix. Yes, it really is that delicious. We’ll see how that goes.

Anybody from the rest of the North American solar racing community reading this will immediately know what I’m talking about. Yes, I’m thinking of NASC 2010.

Long, transcontinental race routes evoke a certain romantic notion of travel and adventure that every one of us learns as a kid. Epic adventures always warm our souls and interest our minds. They raise questions, pose challenges, and write the stories that we forever remember.

Driving Route 66, going to Washington DC, descending into Los Angeles all evoke this kind of strong emotion. It helps both teams and the race get sponsors.

Driving the American Cornbelt Tour, on the other hand, is a huge yawner. The places are boring, the route is boring, and the race will be boring. That’s exactly what the 2010 North American Solar Challenge (NASC) promises to deliver. In fact, I’ve even prepared a little photo album in advance, just in case my camera decides to commit suicide from excessive monotony:

Yeah. That looks riveting.

While it’s easy to blame a lack of time and money to run a proper event, these are the same constraints that participants in the event must work under. We have jobs and classes, just like the race organizers. We have to raise money, just like the organizers.

North America is full of amazing roads just asking for adventures. How about a race from Vancouver to LA? Or Charleston to Cape Cod? Or New Orleans to Miami? Or Toronto to New York? It doesn’t have to be a long race, it just has to be a good one.

With a good route, you don’t even need captions on the photos.

Many teams take a very competitive and adversarial view of the solar racing sport. We here on the Stanford team try to be a bit more open and laid back about it. To us, this is a labor of love, not a testosterone filled kill-fest.

We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to take ideas from everyone else and improve upon them. Solar car racing is more about creating a welcoming atmosphere for students to get really, really good at something and have a great time while doing it than it is about anything else. We also believe that there’s no loss in competitive advantage by sharing information.

To that end, I would like to announce our intention to release as open source most of the designs of our car. Electrical hardware and software information will be the first to go up on the web, as it is most easily packaged into easily digestible formats. The rest will come shortly thereafter.

We would only ask that if you do choose to download any of these designs, please leave a comment on the page where you got it. That will give us and everyone else an idea as to what people are finding useful, and that’s good for everyone. If you do improve on the design, post it up on your website and send us the link. We’ll be happy to point our readers to your improvement.

Hopefully this will help lower the barrier to entry for new teams, as well as shake up designs at established ones. Don’t just feel free, but also feel welcome to participate.

Let me once again apologize for detonating the majority of this website some time ago during a server upgrade. I’m a decent engineer, but a lousy webadmin.

With WSC 2009 drawing near, it seems like a good time to build the website back up again. You’ll find the tabs at the top of this section are woefully out of date and don’t line up at all with the text links. Hopefully David Li will manage to either fix that soon or just make those tabs go away altogether.

While you’re ignoring that little shortcoming, you should check out some of our freshly updated content. In particular, the “Team” section of the site is very much revamped. There’s also a lot of new content under “Design”. Neither section is quite complete yet, but it should still be of interest to the dedicated SSCP follower.

As time allows, I’m hoping to increase the number of pictures in these sections to add to visual interest. There are also a number of pages still listed as “under construction”. I’m also working to put some information in all of those.

If you find something that’s under construction that you really, really want to see first, just send us an email. I’ll move that up to the top of my queue and try to get something done right away. Or if you think there should be something on the website that we’ve completely overlooked, hit that contact button up at the top.

Most of us are in Australia! While still waiting on our guest, Lucas Wilkerson, everyone from the Stanford team has made it into Melbourne. It’s an attractive looking city – well groomed, with a nice mix of old and new buildings. A heritage architecture law prevents a lot of demolition. Here’s a picture of a section of waterfront next to a really nice art museum:

This was our first whole day in Australia, but some of us were still feeling pretty jetlagged. Our biggest stop of the day was ACMI – the Australian Center for the Moving Image. We had a lot of fun, and some of the images in this post come from inside. Great showpieces, however, weren’t enough to keep a tired Matt on his feet for the entire duration of the visit:

The streets were well-groomed all right. Here’s a silly machine that goes around all day sweeping up the sidewalks. Too bad I couldn’t snag a picture of it eating a loose paper. Quite vicious…!  At the wheel is a calm, but pushy driver very much interested in making good time. Watching the scrubber weave through the pedestrian traffic is extremely amusing:

Here’s one of the exhibits at ACMI. It’s an old style film strip from the first days of sound-enabled movies. The display case has a handle poking out the side that lets you run the strip, giving you control of the audio playback. It’s more fun than you’d imagine playing with the speed and making the people in the film sound quite strange.

You read the Wired photoblog entry, right? You know who this is:

Ben and DC Posch may try to avoid acting like nerds, but we know better:

To redeem himself, Ben egged Nathan into monkeybars-ing their way across the river. The inside flats on that I-beam were pretty filthy. I just hope they washed their hands before eating dumplings.

We’ll do our best to keep up the pictures during our trip to Australia. At least here in the first few days we’ll have plenty of internet access and downtime. After that, however, and it might get hard for us to make posts.