Here Comes The Sun Power
Hi everyone, this is Nate checking in. I am the newest member of the Saleae team. This weekend, Mark, Jonathan and I had a chance to check out the Stanford Solar Car Project down in Palo Alto. Saleae provided the team with a few Logic16s for their car and they’ve made good use of them debugging SPI communication with some of their chips. The project is completely student-run and competes biannually in the World Solar Challenge, a solar-power car race in Australia. Right now, the team is gearing up for next year’s race in the summer of 2013. Code Team Lead (and driver) Rachel graciously showed us around. For more info on the cool stuff they’re doing, check out their website. Good luck in Australia next summer, guys!
Xenith, which competed at the World Solar Challenge in 2011, can reach speeds upwards of 85 mph.
The Saleae Logic16 hard at work on one of the Stanford Solar Car’s boards.
Mark (left) looks on as Jonathan (right) gets behind the wheel in one of SSCP’s older cars.
Just a few parking spots away is one of Stanford’s autonomous cars. How long until these two projects converge into one?
One of Stanford's autonomous cars, a successor to their DARPA-winning Stanley from 2005
On our way back we stopped at the Tesla Motors location down the street to see some electric cars on the market. Perhaps, in the future, Telsa will be making a solar-powered car on a consumer level.
Mark steps into a Tesla Roadster.