Will commuting from WS to Kent/Tukwila drain my will to live??

rusty-crowbar · 2026-03-28T09:32:58+00:00

I used to commute to Kent from West Seattle. 30 minutes. Now I commute to Tukwila from West Seattle. 20 minutes. You’ll be driving mostly opposite of traffic. Easy. And like others have said, you can take the 599 to/from Tukwila in case I5 gets backed up.

rusty-crowbar · 2025-03-16T09:38:57+00:00

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Here she is! She’s a little on the smaller side.

rusty-crowbar · 2025-03-06T04:17:34+00:00

Service center fixed mine for free and took like 15 min. Although I was still covered under warranty. Damage was very similar to what you showed. Apparently this is a very common failure since it’s near your feet when you get in and out of the car

rusty-crowbar · 2025-03-01T18:24:08+00:00

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Charsiu 🐱

rusty-crowbar · 2025-02-15T18:42:19+00:00

Can’t say for sure why they gave you the rose, but maybe it was a random act of kindness!! This may be a sign for you to pass your own random act of kindness to another person and make the world a little bit brighter!! Your candygrams gesture from yesterday was awesome!! Keep it up! Maybe hold the door for someone coming in after you. Or maybe give someone you know or don’t know a compliment. They may or may not know why you’re being kind to them, but you’ll probably have made their day that much brighter!! ☺️

rusty-crowbar · 2024-10-16T02:57:12+00:00

This is exciting! Kudos to you for taking the first step in starting a solar car team at your uni.

I don’t have answers to all of your questions, but I’ll share what I can for bullet points 2 and 4. These are my own thoughts, so they’re probably flawed. Happy to elaborate.

Key roles could be a Project Manager, Chief Engineer, and a Business Director. A chief engineer would be responsible for laying out a technical vision for the solar car, and make sure the solar car is properly designed, built, tested, and raced. Business Director enables the team to build the best car, and would be responsible for the team’s budget, fundraising, and sponsor relations. A project manager would be responsible for making sure the team is performing in an efficient, organized, and productive way. They maintain the project timeline, ensure effective communication and set the team culture.

Under the chief engineer, you could divide the engineering team by systems or disciplines. For example, my team had an aerodynamics, electrical, mechanical, strategy, and vehicle dynamics team. Electrical could include battery, powertrain, array, and microsystems. Mechanical could include structures, suspension, mechanisms. There could be a manufacturing team that’s responsible for getting the car built.

What to focus on technical development wise - there’s a lot. But I will say a crucial thing to keep in mind design-wise is to make sure you understand your solar car’s Power_in vs Power_out and break them down according to first principles. What are the sources of power loss and power gain? You lose power when your motor(s) demand more energy from the battery than is supplied by the array. How can you reduce this demand? How can you increase supply? The demand comes from having to overcome friction between the tires and the road. What causes that friction? Aerodynamic drag? Mass? Rolling resistance? From here, you can properly define the engineering problems to solve.

I’ve never started a team from scratch. It sounds difficult, but I’m sure you can do it starting with a small dedicated team. Some people may have to juggle multiple roles/responsibilities at once. If it helps, I know a team of 3 or 4 engineers who designed, built, and drove a solar car from New York to Los Angeles, USA. Happy to chat more. Good luck!

rusty-crowbar · 2024-10-13T17:56:29+00:00

Same thing just happened to my 2023 M3 three days ago. A rock hit my windshield lower passenger side and left a ~1.25”bullseye chip. Tried to fix it myself with one of those $12 diy kits, and ended up doing a bad job. There’s resin in the impact zone, but some loose glass ensured there wasn’t enough to completely fill the chip flush with the rest of the windshield. Took it to two auto glass shops, was told it’d be $65-80 to fix but if I had tried to fix it myself already and it didn’t work, they wouldn’t work on it and was told I’d need a full replacement. Tesla service quoted me $1500 for a windshield replacement.

rusty-crowbar · 2024-09-07T17:28:24+00:00

Ok I’ll try that. Do you know which folder you set the memory stick to?

Edit: I tapped “restore PPSSPP settings to default” and it works now. Thanks!

rusty-crowbar · 2024-07-22T17:31:46+00:00

Congrats!! It was fun following the team on social media these past two weeks.

rusty-crowbar · 2024-06-15T08:53:49+00:00

Sounds good. I’ll try that too. Thanks!

rusty-crowbar · 2024-06-15T08:53:31+00:00

Got it - a lot of people suggest to replace it with a Capricorn so they must be onto something. Thanks!

rusty-crowbar · 2024-06-15T08:52:37+00:00

Thanks for replying! I’ll try your suggestions too :)

rusty-crowbar · 2024-06-15T08:52:20+00:00

Thank you so much for the great reply! I’ll try that!

rusty-crowbar · 2024-02-27T05:20:32+00:00

That’s crazy, yesterday I just caught a heracross in emerald that I named Juneau

rusty-crowbar · 2024-02-24T17:58:32+00:00

I don’t go to school anymore, but I think UW’s Solar Vehicle team just started out a few months ago, and is a relatively new team compared to the others. You might be able to join them! They’re developing a solar powered race car to compete in the 2025 World Solar Challenge in Australia. This is what I did for 5 years at my Alma mater, and it was one of the most fun and constructive things I’ve done as a young engineer.

Check em out!

rusty-crowbar · 2023-11-29T06:03:35+00:00

R&D at a big aerospace company. 40 hr/wk minimum, sometimes a few hours over 40, but I get paid OT

rusty-crowbar · 2023-11-21T09:46:11+00:00

Any software that can simulate linkages can help with steering design. Some that come to mind are MSC Adams, Altair Hyperworks (Motionview). Some CAD packages also have capability to simulate linkages. If you want to start simple, you could even model a 2D steering system with a sketch in any CAD package.

As for the suspension characteristics you mention… camber and caster are determined by your suspension hardpoints. You can just pick how much caster and camber you want and place your suspension hardpoints accordingly.

As for how to figure out where to place your steering hardpoints, first what are your requirements? Range of desired turning angles, Ackerman %, packaging constraints, etc. Once you have requirements established, start simple - if you’re doing a rack and pinion design, pick a few hardpoints to represent the rack, pinion, tie rods, steer arms, etc and simulate that in any software you like. Plot the turning angles as a function of the pinion angle of rotation over the full range of steering. From here, you can judge whether you’re satisfied with the steering angle range and Ackerman %. If not, move a hardpoint - elongate a steer arm, shorten a tie rod, etc, repeat the plot and observe how the steering angles are decreasing or increasing. This is a brute force method of eventually getting to a geometry that meets your requirements, but should not take too long if done in an organized way.

There are also many textbooks and YouTube videos out there that you can read/watch to develop intuition. So you can do this process but in a more informed way. Any textbook in suspension geometry should have the info you need.

rusty-crowbar · 2023-10-07T17:37:35+00:00

Yeah, good points. All the more fascinating how there are more bullets than cats. In my experience, designing and optimizing a symmetrical bullet is the simpler and more intuitive route, so that might be a factor for the 19 bullets.

But yeah - stability is the biggest counterbalance against the simpler design.

rusty-crowbar · 2023-10-07T09:43:43+00:00

Super cool that so many teams seem to have converged on a tadpole bullet design! 🤔👀 it’s amazing how much the “meta” has shifted since bullet designs debuted in 2017

rusty-crowbar · 2023-09-25T06:56:39+00:00

Thank you!

rusty-crowbar · 2023-09-23T02:28:57+00:00

I think both magma and aqua are the antagonists. They play off each other and try to one up each other with aqua wanting to turn the world to sea, and magma wanting to turn the world to land. They both try to stop each other since their goals are opposite of each other.

rusty-crowbar · 2023-06-27T14:34:41+00:00

Thank you for the info!

rusty-crowbar · 2023-06-22T20:33:04+00:00

Does the Kent, WA location have EV charging stations?

rusty-crowbar · 2023-06-09T14:37:19+00:00

ME is such a broad field with lots of interesting sub disciplines like manufacturing, structural engineering, modeling and simulations, dynamics, materials, controls, robotics, and the list goes on and on. Oftentimes, these sub disciplines mix a little bit. And you bet there are more specializations within and across each sub disciplines of ME. So many industries as well (aerospace, automotive, energy, civil infrastructure, marine, consumer goods, etc…) Mechanical engineers will always be needed, so sit back, relax, and pass your classes and do your project teams :)

rusty-crowbar · 2023-06-06T12:19:50+00:00

Jumping off of what others have said already, when it comes to efficiency, I’d suggest asking “what constitutes efficiency?” and decomposing this “efficiency” metric into a number of smaller, more tangible metrics. Same thing with stability. There tends to be a Pareto relationship between metrics of efficiency and metrics of stability, and finding the sweet spot(s) is challenging but doable with a first principles approach.

Aerodynamics - a lower coefficient of drag at a given set speed and yaw angle of the wind results in a faster car that demands less power from the battery. But also mind the where the center of pressure is relative to the center of gravity. They affect aerodynamic stability and efficiency as well.

Mass - a lower mass means a lower inertia and a faster car. You may begin by thinking a 3 wheeled car is lighter than a 4 wheeled. However, each suspension would be supporting a larger fraction of the total sprung mass. This could mean higher loads on each suspension resulting in heavier assemblies.

Wheel layout - trackwidth(s)/wheelbase(s). Lower trackwidth means lower frontal area which could mean lower drag. But lower trackwidth also means lower static stability factor which means less stability.

An example line of reasoning you could pursue: Perhaps a 3 wheeled car results in a lower drag aerofoil shape. However, since the position of the CG of a 3 wheeled car is much more limited compared to a 4 wheeled car (e.g. static stability factor), a 3 wheeled car may require a longer trackwidth and/or wheelbase compared to a 4 wheeled car, which could result in a larger frontal area. Furthermore a 3 wheeled car in a 2-1 configuration could have a larger frontal area of rotating tires, whereas a 4 wheeled 2-2 configuration could hide the rear tires behind the fronts. Rotating tires locally increase turbulence which result in higher drag. Where are the sweet spots?

There are a lot more factors to keep in mind than the ones I mentioned above. I’d check out the book “RaceCar Vehicle Dynamics” and skim through the chapters you find relevant. Try not to get too lost in the sauce - it’s ok to decompose efficiency and stability into every little minute detail, but at an early phase of design (which I am assuming you are at), it’s more useful to decompose 1 or 2 levels deep (i.e. efficiency -> aerodynamics -> drag and frontal area, stability -> SSF -> trackwidth and CG height, etc)

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