Solar Cars

My partner and I were given one piece of wood to build our solar cars with and that was it.

The first thing I decided to do was sketch where I would put all of my desired pieces on the wood. The "pieces" included wheels and axels, a motor, a battery pack, and two gears. I then did the exact same thing except on my ipad just so I would have a digital copy.

Step 2: laser cut

The wood my class and I were given was balsa wood. Being such a thin and flimsy piece of wood, it is very prone to igniting in the laser cutter. We thought about a solution and eventually came to the decision that putting tape on the side we were going to cut, so the wood would not light on fire.

3rd step: 3D print

If you scroll up, you will see that on my digital sketch, there are boxes sketched in the middle of the board. Those boxes represent beams that would hold up the solar panel. At first, I thought I could just laser cut the beams, but I soon realized that the wood available was too heavy for the balsa wood. My partner and I found a solution. We could just 3D print it! (The photo only shows two beams, but we printed four)

This is a video of our solar car running once I assembled the battery pack, attached the motor, and glued the beams on. I had a little bit of trouble attaching the motor because the gear attached to the motor would not be fully in the slots of the gear on the axel of the back wheels causing the two gears to just skim each other and not turn the axel.

My partner and I then glued a white board on the beams to attach the solar panel to our car. We could not just attach the solar panel directly onto the beams because the solar panel could not balance on the beams by itself.

Here is the test run.

Many test runs later, we were ready for the actual race. We had to run our car four times due to the gears not being properly placed and the exposed wire being too short causing it to fall out of the motor's wire slots.