Hi all!

Boston’s in deep freeze, school is starting up, and xFair is around the corner. That means blog updates… yay!

My dedication to keeping this blog was even worse than expected. It’s a new year though so I promise I will try – and most likely fail – to keep this up to date.

To catch you all up, this year I was elected to keyholdership at MIT’s SIPB club, helped redevelop the school’s CourseRoad academic planner, and took some absurdly interesting classes. I also discovered the new love of my life, massive eater of my time, and favorite hobby… Formula SAE electric racecar!

Seriously, MIT’s team is amazing and it is an honor to work with them. It has been my most serious engineering experience to date. Unlike 90% of the project teams I’ve been on, they don’t flounder. FSAE has organized subteams, hard deadlines, and significant budgets.

I think the make or break factor is the team’s 12-20 hour minimium weekly commitment. Everyone at MIT is smart, but when students here put in the time to become experts the results are staggering.

Here are just a couple of examples that wowed me:

  • The EEs build dozens of boards with three rounds of revision and testing.
  • We run in-house dynamometer tests on all of our motors, rather than rely on manufacturer specs.
  • The MechE team designed three prototypes for and spent $10000 load, wear, and stress testing their new planetary gearbox design.
  • The software team collects gigabytes of sensor and controls data during the competitions endurance event. They have a telemetry setup that can provide a real-time data feed.

In any case expect a bunch more projects as I post some to the work that I have done for the team.

And as Steve McQueen once said, "”Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting.”.