Over the last 9 weeks Anteater Racing Electric has been very busy making huge strides with this year’s vehicle! We finally completed and got a circuit design concept, for the painful, brake plausibility device, BPD for short. The BPD is a device that would trigger the shutdown circuit in the car if the driver hard brakes and power was delivered to the motors for more than 0.5 seconds. While it may sound simple it isn’t as this has to be a nonprogrammable circuit, making it a pain to deal with. So coming in this year, this was a huge issue as we have never actually gotten one to work over the 2 years, and thanks to the hard work and dedication of our Electrical Safety Officer, Xavier, we finally have a design modeled and working.
In the same time we finally got to run the majority of the vehicle’s electrical system on that plywood mockup we made a few weeks back! This is the first time that any of us have ever seen both motors in working at the same time with the high voltage and low voltage system, as shown with the big smile on our team member’s face. And along with this step huge step forward, all subsystems have begun working on the designs for the mechanical side of the vehicle, hoping to have most major designs frozen before week 5 of the winter quarter.