Trip Stats

Summary

This was the first day we decided to enhance our racing strategy by adding in battery State of Charge (and thereby range) estimation in order to optimize where we would charge during the day, and give ops a heads up for where we were planning on staying for the night, instead of scrambling to figure that out. It turns out that Karl's initial projection at the start of the day was accurate to about 10 km, and then his updated projection at the stage checkpoint was accurate to about 5 km.

Leaving Craters of the Moon was a nightmare, because Onda Solare stopped immediately, right we turned onto a major road, at the base of a hill. Illinois and Georgia Tech were behind us, and somehow, Onda Solare didn't pick up any penalties there for impeding solar cars behind them. We stopped there for a good 2 minutes while the officials figured out how to route us around them, considering there was oncoming traffic and there was no passing lane. As a result, we picked up a 1 minute penalty there for pushing the car in order to get it started.

We then immediately proceeded to pick up our second 1 minute penalty for pushing the car on the left turn onto the major road, since our lead vehicle stopped right at the crest of the hill.

There were some radio issues with our handheld radio set, as Minnesota's trailer attempted to pass us, which we later learned was due to their passenger getting shocked by HV as they were readjusting Telemetry. They would be stuck there until later the next day, as they resolved that issue.

Apparently, the story goes that about 20 minutes into the stage, their driver noticed smoke coming from their dashboard. Their caravan immediately pulled over and proceeded assuming it was a battery fire, and had their passengers immediately egress. It wasn't actually necessary, and they immediately realized that the smoke was caused by heated carbon fiber in the car’s dashboard itself. They replaced a fuse and got the car worked again. After another 10 minutes of driving, some of Eos II’s telemetry network shut down. They radioed the passenger to check the connections on the telemetry box, but was shocked after touching it. Somehow, they had a short to the carbon fiber shell of the car. They spent pretty much the rest of the day there kapton-taping everything, trying to figure out where the short was. About an hour before the end of regulation raycing, they attempted to start driving again, but encountered the same short.

According to the team, it was caused by their back-up motor (an Eos I motor) that they swapped in last stage. There was a known fault in Eos I motors, where the windings in the motor could short to its casing, which was a design fault that was corrected in the Eos II motors. As a result, this exposed all of the metal structural components attached to it. They had isolated their suspension from the motor, but their brakes still touched the motor and would cause a short through their brake lines to the rest of the car. In the end, they swapped their demagnetized motor back in.

As for us, we made it to the checkpoint with no major issues. Karl raced into the Walmart in order to charge his laptop, because the Chase car was noticing that when plugging in a 12V inverter, it would cause issues with the CB radio that was in the car, and so that was something that we wished to avoid doing if possible.

Overall, the rest of the day went pretty smoothly. There were some issues with our Motor Controllers overheating, which happened 2-3 times on the hill climbs, but there wasn't much we could do about that. We tried to maintain our lead over Onda Solare and catch up to App State, but ultimately, Onda Solare ended up passing us and continuing on to Nyssa before stopping for the night.

About 40 minutes before the end of regulation raycing, the convoy decided that the best move would be to push as far as we could go for the day, in order to build up a sizable buffer should things go wrong the next day. So we pulled over into a parking lot, with a plan to charge for 30 minutes and then drive for 10 minutes which should deplete our pack to a position where we felt comfortable.

During this time, Kaitlyn walked into a hardware store in order to use a washroom, and ended up talking to the owner about the competition, and mentioned that we were still looking for a place to camp for the night. The owner immediately offered to put us in the church, and they could open the house up beside it for us to shower and use the washroom. After finding out that we needed a place to charge the Model X, they suggested that we head over to the school (Adrian High School), where we could camp on the fields and use the washrooms and locker rooms for showers. Within 30 minutes, everything was sorted out, and they even unplugged their stove so that we could use their 220V outlet to charge the Model X.