I know that there hash’t been a lot of news lately on our blog, so I thought I would share a picture from this past weekend. Our team had been storing our molds in temporary locations for the last few months, but we finally found a long term storage place to put our molds for building Xenith. Here are a bunch of our new members carrying one of our Bayview Composites molds.

We have some beautiful new photos from our trip in Australia. Check them out below!

Today, the team presented our vehicle, Xenith, during a breakout session of the Stanford US Rio + 2.0 Conference hosted by the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Department of State. The forum attracted around 400 international policy makers, members of the NGO community, and innovators to discuss sustainable development and innovative technologies that can address major global issues in health, the environment, agriculture and sustainable economic growth. Our project and the other automotive projects at the Stanford Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab hosted around 25 guests as part of this conference. Check out the link below to read more about the conference and the Stanford Center for Social Innovation.

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!

Thanks to everyone who donated during our last round of fundraising this fall! There have been some delays which held up the last set of donations, but now we are receiving your generous contributions. Our great sponsors helped to get our team to the World Solar Challenge, and the race was an extraordinarily valuable learning experience for our team. Here are some of those donors.

In Kind Donations:

Altium is the leading developer of solutions that help engineers design and build the next generation of electronic products. Altium’s vision has been to level the playing field for electronics designers by offering an alternative to expensive, difficult-to-use tools. Altium is now a global company with a passion for innovation, and the goal of redefining the way electronic products are developed. Altium generously supported our team through an in-kind donation of Altium Designer.

SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools for engineering modeling, simulation, and publishing. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help us design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use has allowed us to train new members quickly while designing our next solar car. SolidWorks helped our team by providing our team with licenses for a number of their 3D software packages.

SynQor is a leading supplier of power conversion solutions to the communications, computing and industrial markets. SynQor’s innovative products are designed to exceed the demanding performance, quality, and reliability requirements of today’s power electronic engineers that are developing leading-edge infrastructure hardware. SynQor’s capabilities include both standard and custom solutions for distributed power architectures. SynQor provided our team with a set of prototype power converters. They moved mountains to help us out at the last minute before our race and even overnighted the converters to us. We appreciate their help.

Friends Level Sponsors:

Adopt a Panel Level Sponsors:

Henry and Margy Dudley

The Hsu Family

Other Sponsors:

Justy Burdick

Eric Ellenoff

Richard Gaughan

Thomas Sachson

If you have contributed to our team but have not seen your name or company on our website please let us know. It is likely that your gift is still held up in the delay, and we want to ensure that recognize all of our sponsors.

Our team has already started organizing and brainstorming for our next car. We plan to take many of the principles and technologies that we developed with Xenith to build an even faster and more refined car. As always, our team will be reaching out to get help with our project. We are looking for everything from wind tunnel access to in kind part donations to cash sponsorships to industry mentors.

Our next design, build, and race cycle will start at the beginning of the new year. All Stanford students are welcome to join our exciting project. We are a multidisciplinary team with engineering, science, and humanities majors. Email contactsolarcar@lists.stanford.edu if you want information about our first meetings in 2012. We would love to have you on our team.

There will be some exciting new changes to our project in the upcoming two years, so check back often to follow our progress!

The Stanford Solar Car Project is recruiting new members for our next build cycle. We are a team that designs, builds, and races solar powered race cars. If you are an engineer, an entrepreneur, a scientist, a designer, a hacker, a businessperson, a coder, or any other Stanford student you need to join this group. The Stanford Solar Car Project will give you the hands on engineering and business experience that you have been missing in your classes, and you will have a ton of fun while learning a lot.

If you are ready to join here is what you need to do:

• Come to our new member meeting on Saturday the 14th at Noon. If you miss the first meeting just come to the next meeting on Mondays at 7:30pm or on Saturdays at noon. We meet at the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab on the west side of campus. Here is a map.
• Join our mailing list here.
• If you want to get in touch with us you can email us at contactsolarcar@lists.stanford.edu
• Bookmark our website at solarcar.stanford.edu
• Fill out this survey at goo.gl/LslGO

The team just returned from an epic 3000km race across the Australian Outback called the World Solar Challenge. We are currently planning for the 2013 race, so now is the best time to join. We will be designing our next car from now until the summer and we will start building our next car during the 2012-2013 school year. Solar Car could be the highlight of your Stanford experience, so browse through our website to see what you have been missing.

To all SSCP Alumni:

Our team recently returned from the 2011 World Solar Challenge. We built an ambitious and exciting car named Xenith, and now we are preparing to design and build an even more competitive car for the 2013 WSC. Our team is good at creating bold designs, and now we are reorganizing our team to ensure that our designs are more robust and well tested.

We want to have more thorough design reviews while we build and test our next car, so we are building a network of Stanford alumni and

other professionals who can mentor our group. All of you have built solar cars already, so we want your advice. A strong alumni network will allow us to pass down knowledge and to prevent future teams from making the same mistakes that past teams have made. We would like to create a directory of existing alumni to start the network, so we have a quick survey for you to fill out. We would like to ask some of you to offer your wisdom when our members need help solving especially complex design problems and when projects are ready to receive a professional design review. You can indicate in the survey if you are too busy to help with design reviews, but we would always like to have you on our directory so that we can keep you in the loop. We hope to invite you to new car unveilings, to help you connect with other alumni, and to send you a quick update newsletter when we reach major milestones.

This link, http://goo.gl/UqqDF, will take you to a site to sign up for our network. If you have contact information for other SSCP alumni, please forward them this message. We want to include as many alumni on our directory as possible.

Please let us know if you have any other ideas for how everyone can benefit from this network. We could do anything from alumni reunion BBQs to a job posting bulletin board.