Racing Solar Cars

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Dad Labs. Here we are shooting at the Maker Faire in Austin Texas and they have got a lot of cool process things here that you can do with your kids. Hey dude how are you? Here I am with Rob and his son Eden and they have built this solar car called Solito and he is going to tell us all about it. Rob: This a project I started with my son, we originally, we were doing just some simple project to see how far we can make the car move and it started with just some simple solar panels and a DC motor and some erector sets with wheels and riding along. It's got a 13 watt solar panel roof on the top, carbon fiber tubing which is extremely light and extremely strong and a brushless DC motor for high efficiency and I wrote some software programs to run the motor and also stepped it up a little bit in terms of the solar cells. Daddy Troy: And Eden you helped out building this as well. What part did you take? Eden: I took the lights which we had in the front but I gone right now and I helped with the wheels. Daddy Troy: Cool. And where are thees wheels from? Eden: Home Depot. Daddy Troy: They are looking like lawn mower wheels to me. Is that what they are? Eden: Yes, that's what they are. Daddy Troy: Pretty cool. And how cloudy can it be and this thing still run? Eden: Pretty cloudy. It can just a little bit of sun and then we will make it run. Daddy Troy: Well that's great. Well this is Rob and Eden, they are telling us about their solar car. Here I am with Cyrus, he is EE student at UT, that's University of Texas and they have built a solar car, that last solar car we just looked at puts out 13 watts, this one puts out 1.2 KW, 1.2 KW, that's 1200 watts, that's a lot. So tell me when you were a kid when did you start tinkering or doing thing like this? Cyrus: I mean ever since I was young I would take apart remotes, I would take apart just like anything that I could find that had screws on it, I wanted to know what was inside and just figure it out. Daddy Troy: And were your parents involved in that at all? Cyrus: They didn't necessarily push me in one direction but definitely my parents told me how to be inquisitive just about everything. One of the main points of our organization is they introduce people to what solar panels are and applications that they can use. So what we can do too here for kids is I will show them how we can take an electric car and turn it on with just some solar panels. So you could imagine how a little car like that can get as much energy from that solar panel now you can imagine how much energy we can get from our car. Daddy Troy: Well that's all this week for Dad Labs. Remember if you are in Austin or in San Fransisco you could go check out the Maker Faire. They also have a website. We will see you next week on dadlabs.com.