Week 3 (4th May week)

This week we met up with Multi-Disciplinary Project (MDP) and Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering (MAE) students who are also involved in the Solar Car project.

We started off with discussing about our progress with them and vice versa. From there we explored on ways on how we could delegate our tasks evenly to increase the efficiency of our work. One of the main concern that was brought up was the Liquid-crystal display (LCD) for the solar car driver.

Few of the concerns that were highlighted was the aesthetic display, parameters to display and feasibility to implement the display. As compared to Sunspec3, a 20x4 LCD was used for the driver display of the car. Thus, for this year, we decided to improve the driver display by using a Graphical LCD (GLCD) as it is more aesthetically pleasing to the eyes and much more clearer for the driver to look at the parameters displayed. However the downside of using a GLCD was, it consumes higher power than a normal LCD which contributes to a higher total power loss of the car. After scrutinizing the advantages and disadvantages, we made a conclusion to stick with GLCD. This is because after thorough research on the different brands of GLCD in the market, we were able to find a suitable display that was both aesthetically appealing and has a low power consumption.

Moving forward with that, we met up with one of the MAE students to discuss about the placement and the size of the LCD in the car. The initial idea was to place them by the control panel. However, after great deliberation, we realized that the placement was impractical for the driver as it was not at the eye level. Therefore, the placement had to change. Fortunately, we were able to decide on the size of the driver display and with that we were able to check driver display from our telemetry list.

To conclude this week, we learnt that working on such a big project like this demands various solutions to problems and concerns. Finally, we have agreed upon the usage of GLCD with MDP and MAE students. Besides that, we have taken into consideration the feasibility and practicality of the driver display.