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Solar Car Team Website
At the beginning of my freshman year at Iowa State University (ISU), I joined PrISUm, the Solar Car team at ISU. I quickly got involved in working on the car. The club designs and builds working cars powered by the sun that race agaist other solar cars during the summer. Another goal of PrISUm is inspiring interest in STEM and clean energy through outreach by taking the car to events, speaking at schools, and driving the car around the state. The Solar Car team is interdispline and has Electical, Mechanical, Strategy, Business subteams all working together to acheive the common goal. I joined the electrical subteam and worked on projects within that subteam, eventually stepping into leading the electircal team.
Details
As a part of the electrical sub-team, I worked on the circuit board, and some programming of the horn and lights board in the car (HAL). Working on HAL, I became more familiar with embedded systems coding in C, Altium Designing (an industry-standard software for PCB design), and Controller Area Network (CAN), a communication protocol that allows interfacing between the different parts of the car. After I finished board design, I got the experience of testing the board with electrical lab equipment and creating new revisions based on the testing results.

As the year progressed and the car neared completion, I started helping with the system integration testing. We had each portion of the car working independently, but we ran into many problems and bugs as we put them all together. This gave me a great deal of experience debugging the issues and learning different problem isolation and solving methods.

I was a part of the race crew that attended the competition and qualified for the summer races. We had to fix issues with qualifications, other things that came up while preparing for the event, and things that broke during the event. This was a very time-constrained high-stress event for the entire team, which is similar to what can occur in industry and was a significant learning experience problem solving under pressure.

Fall 2021 and Spring of 2022, I held the role of Assistant Electrical Director. I ran meetings, assisted the overall organization of the Electrical team, and helped out when necessary on work and testing days. That Summer, we went on race again with greater success and became the first multiple occupant vehicle of Iowa State to qualify for the American Solar Challenge.

Fall of 2022 to Summer 2023, I was the Electrical Director leading the electrical sub-team by selecting our project focus and management team for the year. I led workdays and the onboarding new members to ensure the future of our team and passing on the skills I learned.