CMR Build 18

Many of CMR’s team members participated this week in Carnegie Mellon’s Build 18 event – with students working all week on an ECE/CS related project. Not to miss a great opportunity to work on race cars, CMR was well represented.

One project wired rotary potentiometers, pressure sensors, tapped the throttle position sensor on CMR 67, and connected them to a computer to play Need For Speed using the car’s controls. Crowds were gathering around to see.

A custom lap timer was also made for keeping track of our testing times, in addition to a reprogrammed RC car using a custom software package that will translate onto next year’s GLV controls system to increase sampling speed.

It was also an exciting process getting the car into the Gym, the looks we received from CMU employees was priceless.

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Electrical Machining

Back from Winter Break, CMR has plunged right back into manufacturing – especially of our new electric components. Hours of copper machining has taken place to make 300 1/8″ OD tubing inserts for our accumulator PCB board, along with 90 bus bars to connect our batteries.

Custom cut G10-FR4 fiberglass has also arrived, and our accumulator container will be taking shape very shortly!

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Winter Break Activities

Although the semester has now ended and most students have spread across the world, CMR continues to forge on. Everyone has been given their Winter Break assignments and will be keeping busy pushing the team forward, especially without classes to prevent us! This includes continuing ANSYS and ADAMS simulations, manufacturing, and organizing logistics for the upcoming semester.

Several students will even be returning to Pittsburgh early to work on CMR 14e uninterrupted and machine many components.

CMR wishes everyone a Happy Holiday season!

Stickers and Saw

To celebrate a long semester of work and Formula, the entire team was rewarded this week with custom printed team stickers to show CMR pride around campus. We will all take these and our winter assignments home to continue developing CMR 14e.

CMR also removed our old friction saw to make more room for our new race car, and to improve the shop overall. Although it was an adventure, our extremely in-shape team was able to maneuver the 800 lb device out of the shop.

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Team Progress

Last week we our team was happy to distribute the Official CMR 14e shirt to all members and University friends. We will be proudly wearing our gear throughout the year while we build our electric race car, and at both Lincoln and New Hampshire competitions.

In the meantime many waterjetted parts have been rolling in thanks to Atomatic Manufacturing Co., and we have enjoyed some beautiful Pittsburgh testing days with CMR 57 and 67.

We will be making a rolling chassis push from now until the semester ends, so look out for much more progress to come.

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New CMU President

Carnegie Mellon Racing was happy to welcome President Suresh at his Inauguration Celebration this past week by proudly displaying CMR 67 on campus. We look forward to working more with Dr. Suresh in our electric race car development this year and in the future.

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Chassis Underway

With the arrival of both our chassis and chassis jig this week, the CMR shop has livened up and our full-scale build season officially begins! Expect a speedy build with out Lincoln Electric trained welding team and custom jigging ready to go.

Thanks to our machinists, parts have been rolling off the mills this past week too, with many of our waterjet parts awaiting assembly already onto the chassis.

CMR sends a big thank you to our friends at Misumi and Cartesian for their support.

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Karting with the Team

Being the close-knit racing community we are at CMR, many on the team spent this nice, brisk Sunday morning improving driver skills and developing stronger bonds while karting at PittRace. Although less than 40 degrees outside, we filled the track with CMR drivers and had three great runs. Plus we were back with plenty of time to continue working on finalizing our new electric car’s design too!

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Material Rolling In

With all our material beginning to flow in for machining we’ve needed to pull out the big guns to handle it all. Thank you to Alcoa for all the aluminum!

 

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