Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1104607
APRIL 2019 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 49 cause so many were check- ing out the car and talking to your team. How did you become involved with the team, and what has your ex- perience been? Olson: Of course. I love talk- ing about the team! Being in your mid-20s and an under- graduate can be incredibly frustrating at times. But the thing about being older and having already been through this is that hindsight is on my side. I wanted to make sure that I got even more out of my experi- ence at Minnesota than what I did at Wiscon- sin. I wanted to be more involved with either a professor's research or a student group, and I knew about the solar vehicle team at the U of M, which made the decision about how to get involved a little easier. I decided to just jump right in regardless of the type of work because I thought it was a good way to get to know everybody on the team and show my commitment by helping wherever an extra set of hands was needed. My friend and I joined the team together at the same time, which happened to be right at the beginning of the build cycle of our previous car, Eos II, which was at Geek-a-Palooza. That meant that a lot, and I mean A LOT, of manual labor was needed at that time. After a short period on the team, I was fortu- nate enough to become involved with the elec- trical design of one of the subsystems of the car. For some background, our team is broken up into two divisions: engineering and opera- tions. The operations division handles most of the business side of the team while engineer- ing obviously handles the engineering side. The engineering division is then broken up by discipline, including the vehicle dynamics team, aerodynamics and structures team, and controls team. A lot of computer engineers fall into the con- trols team, which essentially handles all of the electrical systems on the car. From there, each team typically has subgroups that are broken up by functionality. For instance, the vehicle dynamics team has a suspension group and a steering group whereas the controls team has a battery group, a dashboard group, etc. Each of the subgroups in the controls team typically has a PCB associated with it. So, I was fortu- nate enough to be involved in PCB design and actually design one of the electrical systems in our car. The solar project really gives its mem- bers ownership in their work. I can tell you from experience that it's quite rewarding. Dunn: How long is a typical build cycle for a car from start to finish? Olson: I joined right at the start of our last car's build cycle, which would have been at the be- ginning of 2017. Whoa, that's over two years ago! That just hit me. And each of our cars operates over a two-year cycle. The first year is typically spent designing while the second year is used to build the car. We don't get a full two years to design and build each car because we race it in multiple competitions, one of which takes place in Australia. The World Solar Challenge is the largest solar car competition in the world, and it's a 3,000-km race through the Australian outback. Surpris - ingly, most of the journey is a little bit boring given that it's a flat desert, but we camp in the outback under the stars, so that's inter- esting. Figure 3: The University of Minnesota solar vehicle.