Power series is running! (drivers and help needed)

So for those that weren't at the board meeting last night, we ran the maiden voyage of the power series racer!

I would post video but i believe elly or Jon have it.

But hey, show up tonight and we plan on doing further tuning and testing! If you want to jump in, it's definitely not too late!

To be a driver in Detroit (for the actual racing) the requirements are:

1- come to Detroit
2- we need light people. The 60a fuse blows really easily. We need at least two more drivers
3- you need to have a driver's license

For screwing around though, we can pull out the fuse so we actually have a hive electric go-kart. My hope is to let anyone have a chance to actually drive for advertising at maker faires etc.

But wait, we also need help! We have to dress this bad boy up! It needs to be some silly (but easy!) vehicle, for now we're scrapping the pig concept for something more straightforward, like a car.

If you have ideas, post, we'll try to down select tonight, and start working on it. Hopefully this'll be a great time to use the cnc to rapidly make the shell!

Right now, I'm thinking if the following :

Mini verson of my car (it's a box)
Mini ice cream truck (we'll need speakers!)
3d printer (just make a wire frame box around the corners and add a filament spool)
Giant spam can (because why not?)

Post below, and we'll see you at the meeting!

A 3-D printer frame concept could include miles of larger diameter plastic tubing formed into a partial body ( for the log cabin effect) and/might include a driver-activated silly string spraying feature.

JimD

I should also add that we have to do a short skit with whatever we drive, and I for one am in favor of squirting people with silly string

Great idea Jim!

I forgot to mention that anything we can do to get crowd points (the crowd can push a button to give you points, and bribing is allowed) can also make us a winner. So like Jim mentioned, we can always bribe the crowd with silly spraying every 10 points

It also gives us an advantage when racing we sprayed the other drivers.(yes that’s a joke)

Are we scrapping the idea of the Minecraft pig? I also like to mention the idea I also like to mention the idea of a bee

Ok first off the sound of the mini ice cream truck would just dissapoint people like me that a real one was on the way lol I think the bee sounds cool or we can go the science route and make it a tesla like the new all electric sports car manufacturer thar can outrun a ferrari. However for the model of the concept car I’m thinking the shocker. Because it might shock you electricaly if we are messed with. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Lol ok back to sleep now sorry woke up for a sec and had to respond

https://youtu.be/P3EUMOu38LQ the sound of success and our victory lap :slight_smile: turn your speakers up

Lego brick? Batmobile? Mini jawa sandcrawler?

just an fyi i found a roll "174 inches of the 8mm chain and master links for 30 bucks shipped! we can play with multiple gears now and even take slack out of the current one.

Nice

Here is the video Elly took last night: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1r4vcc6hkutbydv/2015-07-14%2003.18.37.mp4?dl=0

If you want a higher quality version click the download button on the dropbox page. :slight_smile:

For those that were not at the meeting tonight be are looking for a little extra cash from a vote at next weeks meeting, We ESPECIALLY need it now as while we were testing tonight using small drivers to fine tune the racer just so the electronics would not be cooked. Even after all of the work I have thrown in to the kart I still have not driven it ( Im way to heavy for testing and even the racing ) plus jim is doing amazing work in the programming to get it dialed in correctly.However tonight we had pretty bad setback as the programming still needed work(we just got our first down and back pass done last night lol but at the meeting we had some bigger drivers that had some play time in it that resulted in a burned out motor which sits inside a transmission we adapted. Please help us with a yes vote as even the money we are asking for will not even come close to covering additional parts needed now :confused: We are still on a search for drivers to lead us to victory however we need smaller people until the software is dialed in perfect. Please refrain from looking at it and going “hey a go kart im driving it” until it is ready please. Thank you to all that have helped and hopefully we can come up with a backup motor in time for detroit. We are running a large brushless outrunner with a 8mm center shaft and 3250 kv if I remember correctly.

sorry added one to many numbers to the kv rating here is what we are running and a link to the one that burned up. Im going to try and do some re gearing however the restrictions in the power series is going to keep us LIMITED to driver size until we can get a happy final drive ratio, then when the power series is over we can play with it. Here is a link to motors we need http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__23521__NTM_Prop_Drive_50_60_Series_380KV_2665W.html

We'll be meeting tonight to work on the frame, if you want to be a part of the selection and build process, see you around 6:30!

And, after a few hours of work, the power series racer is back up and running. We switched out the motor with one from my motorboard, as it turns out it was longer than what we had, but it just barely fit (exactly fit to be precise)

Made a new motor mount, hooked it up, and it goes! The nice thing is that the new motor is a higher torque (and Lower speed) so we'll actually accelerate much nicer now.

This ongoing tuning is how the power series will put fans in the stand lol. Was a 50 60 motor instead of 50 50 and with the other orders should we look for another one. This might sound crazy but we need to put a phone or GPS mount that can record on their to fine tune this bad boy. Also does then arduino board have a input sensor for and infared heat sensor to know our amps and heat while tuning could help a lot in the long runs

And congrats on the hard work and determination to pull a motor out of something else to help get us back to making this thing race worthy. If you have a stl file to print for that amp meter to fit on the bars send it to me and I’ll print it today.

I have a second identical motor, as I used it on my motor board. All that would be required would be to pull the shaft from the power series racer and swap.

Cooling wise we should be able to throw a thermistor in the motor or something just to keep track of a rough temperature

A 3 axis accelerometer would probably be more useful than a GPS here for Tuning the thing.

Depending on when you need it, I have a bunch of thermistors you can choose from.

D

A thermistor might be hard to mount is the new motor a out runner or in runner to really get the can temp. I run torque pro on my phone and it shows acceleration and both gforce in directions it’s pretty nifty. To use that feature their is a way to get a few readings even though not connected to ecu on a obd2

Or is it a 5050 or 5060 if we are lucky lol