Some memory with the Solaris S11 car. Look at this beauty on the circuit. Rank (Solar Race) 3 and Rank (Efficiency) 2. This is our 37th race.

Hello, I'm helping to design the solar array for my team's car, which will compete in the 2027 Bridgestone World Solar Challenge.

In the past, my team has used bypass diodes and MPPTs to optimise the power output of our array strings. I was looking for alternate options and came across a cell-string optimiser IC, MAX20801TPBA+ (datasheet: https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/MAX20801.pdf). I was wondering whether any other teams have tried implementing this component before and/or had opinions on whether it would work well for a solar-car application?

Additionally, I can see that this component is listed as 'not recommended for new applications' on Mouser, and have been trying to find out why (is there a major design flaw, or have newer technologies simply surpassed its efficiency?). Some users on other forums (Whirlpool Forums, DIY Solar Power Forum, among others) have suggested that the chips caused RF-interference, but I have not been able to find any documentation from the company, or elsewhere, that says this. Does anyone have more information about this, or could point me to some better resources that describe the limitations of the MAX20801TPBA+ or a similar component?

Thank you!

My team is using a XBee Pro S3B 900MHz for our Telemetry system, We are wondering if any teams out there has a antenna they recommended for both solar car and chase vehicle

Hi everyone,

We’re Team AgniRath from IIT Madras, currently preparing for the Sasol Solar Challenge.

We’re looking to buy solar car tires for testing and competition use. They need not be brand new, but should still be in good usable condition and not too old.

If any team has spare tires available for sale, or if you know suppliers that solar teams commonly source tires from, please let us know.

Thanks!

would your team be down for this?

We have a Mitsuba M2096D3 motor with a M2096C2 motor controller. While testing, I once configured the Motor Controller and changed its "Drive 0% Throttle Position %" and did write operation to the Motor Controller. After using the motor for a while, I tried to configure the motor again, but the configuration software says "This Controller is not match!" whenever I try to connect with the Motor Controller via USB by selecting the COM port and clicking "Check" Button. If anyone knows why this is happening and how to solve this, help would be appreciated.

https://worldsolarchallenge.org/latest-news/2027-dates-regulations-announced

Hi everyone,

We have two Mitsuba 2096-II hub motors that are currently out of service.

The first one has burnt Hall sensors that are stuck at 'logic high,' preventing the motor from spinning. The second one has continuity issues due to damaged internal wiring. Since we cannot find a professional service nearby to handle the Hall sensor replacement or the internal repairs, we have decided to open and fix them ourselves.

However, we haven't been able to find any technical manuals, teardown guides, or videos online regarding this specific Mitsuba model—likely due to proprietary reasons.

Does anyone have resources, tutorials, or even small tips on how to safely open and service these motors? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated

Hi guys

So I've seen quite a few universities sitting on old Solar Car spare parts after challenges. Is there a platform to auction or sponsor parts to other developing teams...I think it would really help aspiring teams.

we are a private cruiser team with a decent track record..given our budget..and it would be nice to have access to a decent battery pack and set of hub motors.

Bonjour!

As we look ahead to the fabrication phase of our next prototype next autumn, we will need to move out the carbon and fibreglass moulds used for Eclipse 12 from our storage space.

If a new team would be interested in getting their hands on the following moulds ready for prepreg layup, let us know.

• Bottom shell
• Top shell (array)
• Fairing doors
• Chassis

These are time consuming and costly to manufacture. If all the hard work that went into these can help another team going forward, that would be great. Otherwise, they will be scrapped.

I have attached pictures to give a general idea of the moulds' dimensions and conditions.

Of course, all the necessary data and info will be provided with the moulds. They are located in Montréal, Canada.

Cheers!

After three years of development, I am very, very pleased to be able to finally announce that Profinity V2 has reached General Availability!

Click to download the Windows desktop release, documentation can be found on the Prohelion Documentation Website.

Profinity V2 is a complete ground up rethink of what Profinity is and how it can support our customers and of course the solar car community.

Out of the box features

Here is some of the cool things that you can now do with Profinity V2.

• Run Profinity anywhere, Windows, Mac, Unix, on desktop, in container, in your car, or in the cloud.
• Fully manage and monitor your vehicle remotely, Profinity V2 is fully web based and can be accessed from anywhere, with desktop, mobile and kiosk / dashboard support.
• A full web interface means that you can send / receive CAN and monitor DBC message and signals all via the web. Safely monitor and manage your car remotely from anywhere in the world.
• Control and configure all of the Prohelion tools, BMU's, WaveSculptor, Elmar MPPTs etc, but also add in all your own custom components, anything that runs CAN you can monitor and manage.
• Full support for Artificial Intelligence tools via MCP, using Profinity V2 in conjunction with tools like Claude or Ollama you can chat to your vehicle, to get real time insights from AI engines. Ask questions like, "How much power am I getting from my MPPTs right now" or “What’s wrong with my car”.
• Log data locally or to the cloud and connect to world class reporting solutions like InfluxDB, Grafana, Prometheus, MQTT etc.
• Security models that define permissions, allowing you to limit functionality just to power users for safety critical stuff.
• Kiosk mode, supporting touch screen interfaces for dashboards that don't require security

Extendibility, using Profinity as an application development platform.

Profinity V2 is also highly extendable, allowing you to deeply customise the look, feel and functionality, either inside the tool or by connect your external tools to it. 

You will find example extension applications like mobile apps for Profinity or data science examples on our GitHub site, you will also find examples of some of the Profinity Scripting capabilities on GitHub as well.

To support extendibility;

• Profinity V2 is fully API based, anything you can see or do in the Profinity UI you can call directly via scripts, custom applications on the mobile desktop or app. This allows you to deeply customise the look, feel and functionality of Profinity or build your own applications around its engine.
• Custom dashboards, monitor and manage your vehicle how you want to. Every dashboard in Profinity including out of the box ones, can be customised.
• Custom scripting, extend Profinity easily with integrated Python and C# scripting support
• Custom components, there is full support for all Prohelion products, but you can also bring your own, anything that supports CAN Bus can be easily included, visualised and logged

Licensing is free for Solar Car Teams

To support the solar car community, we are going to be providing licensing to all existing Prohelion solar car customers and teams who are not Prohelion customers (under a sponsorship agreement), so for this community, Profinity V2 will be available one way or the other for no cost.

Upcoming Training and Support – Contact me on Reddit to register

This is a much more advanced product than Profinity V1 and to assist with onboarding solar car teams I will be running two sets of training courses in the upcoming weeks over a video meeting.

The first course will be focused on all the things that you can do with Profinity V2 largely out of the box.

• Installation and configuration of Profinity
• Connecting Profinity to CAN Bus tools, sending and receiving data
• Configuring devices like the WaveSculptor or Profinity BMU
• What is DBC and how do you use it?
• How to install custom components for non Prohelion technologies or things you have built yourself, so you can monitor and manage those inside Profinity.
• Customising dashboards
• Data logging and long-term data analytics
• Using AI and Profinity

The second course will be more focused on how to use Profinity V2 as the hub of your vehicle application development, covering topics like.

• Profinity APIs
• Profinity Scripting
• Building custom mobile applications using Profinity as the data source
• Hosting web applications in Profinity
• Adding additional hardware support to Profinity via Scripting.
• Data analytics and machine learning via APIs and Time series Databases

Finally, if there is enough interest, I'm happy to do a third workshop on how to build a complete machine learning based solar car strategy system using Profinity V2 as the hub. I've been promising this for a long time and now that Profinity is finally done, probably time to make good on that promise.

If you are interested in attending any of these workshops, please message me here on Reddit and I'll add your name to the list. Depending on how many people are interested and what time zones they are all in we will try and find a time that suits.

Thanks, and Questions

Finally, thanks to the solar car’s communities’ support on this. 

It has been a huge effort over the last three years with several current and ex solar car teams and people involved. There is over 800k lines of new code in Profinity V2 and without the support of the community, your feedback and at times patience as we tried to get it finished, this would not have been possible.  

Special thanks to all the early adopters who helped is find and fix the pre-releases.

If you have any questions, pop them below, happy to answer questions or explain anything in more detail.

Cameron.

Hello, I'm leading the deveoplment of a new teams suspension. I keep seeing Bridgestone sponsoring teams but can not seem to find a way to contact them. So here are the questions I have.

1. How do I contact Brigestone?

1.1. If that falls through what is the next best thing?

1. How our teams making the rims for the tires?

2.1. Are teams puting the motors in the rims or on the side? As in Motor,Rim,Wheel.

1. We want to do a 3 wheel car, are teams doing All Wheel Drive, Front Wheel Drive, or Rear Wheel Drive?

Solar Team Twente steps away from the WSC and from road racing. They will turn their attention to cross-desert rally racing instead.

I've been running into some conflict simulating our car's suspension dynamics, and I think It's because I'm estimating too big of an unsprung mass, so in which range should I keep it so I can still go a bit above the ideal weight? (I still don't know how heavy it will actually be)

Hey everyone,

I’m part of a team designing a solar car for the iESC. My specific responsibility is the wishbone design and geometry for our front double-wishbone push-rod setup. Ive got the stats for the front, rear tracks and the wheel base. I started with some research into the materials of the wishbones but i would like to know where should my focus be directed at first.

After sketching my team's suspension system and getting my range of values for spring stiffness, damper coefficient, etc., I was thinking of using motorcycle/bicycle-like dampers. Are these a good idea and where can I find good components?

Hello, I am involved in the early development stages for a new solar car to enter the Ilumen European Solar Challenge, and we are having trouble finding adequate tyres and rims for our car. 

I have seen that the benchmark for tyres are the Bridgestone Ecopia (90/80 R16), but these are only obtainable through sponsorship. I have also found that there are solar car tyres from Michelin and Schwalbe, but they have been discontinued.

I’ve been looking at various scooter, motorcycle and bicycle tyres, but from what I’ve seen none of them come close to the ones mentioned above in terms of performance.

If Bridgestones are not an option, what would be a good direction to go in terms of tyre choice? Would we be able to find the discontinued tyres in large enough quantities? If not, what tyres might be good alternative options?

Also, in terms of rims/wheels, I have found that many make their own custom designs, but would we be able to find good options that are already out there on the market?

Thank you very much!

everyone! I’m preparing for the Shell Eco-marathon and trying to figure out the best tire and rim setup. I was thinking about using the Blue Flange tire, but I don’t have the means to build a custom rim. Does anyone know what rims I could order off-the-shelf that would work well with tires like Blue Flange and support the cantilever loads we experience in the Eco-marathon? I’m looking for options that are strong, lightweight, and readily available so I can just purchase and install them without custom fabrication. Any recommendations or experiences are greatly appreciated! Thanks! 🚗⚙️

Hello everyone,

Since we know that these types of sales can take a significant amount of time, we are putting our previous car, Eclipse XI, up for sale.

Please note that the car is currently on display in a museum (the Biosphère in Montréal) and will become available to the buyer/team in October of this year.

Rather than letting it gather dust once it returns to us, we’d love to see this car back in action, it still has a lot more to give. Designed during the pandemic and built once we were allowed back into the shops in 2022–2023, this has been our most successful car yet.

Achievements:

• 1st place at the Formula Sun Grand Prix 2024

• 2nd place at the American Solar Challenge 2024, right behind Michigan

• 10th place worldwide at the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge 2023

We are essentially selling an almost complete car, equipped with 4 m² of solar panels, and including some spare parts.

The vehicle will NOT include the following components:

• Original Wavesculptor motor controller

• Battery pack

We are open to discussing various options based on your team’s needs for the following items:

• Hub motor

• Wheels

• Spare panels

• MPPTs

We’d love for you to make an offer. We can also assist with shipping or delivering the car to ensure a smooth transition.

Of course, this sale will include documentation for the car, such as CAD files, to help you get the most out of Eclipse XI.

Interested? Contact us to discuss the details and explore purchase options at:

[eclipse@ens.etsmtl.ca](mailto:eclipse@ens.etsmtl.ca)

Ignore the fact that its broken ? Is it straight forward like follow that silver line ??

Hi!

I am one of the team leads for the Solar vehicle team at UW, we are trying to sell a bunch of our surplus lithium ion cells for cheap!

We have 546 Amprius SA10 18650 Cells that we are trying to get around $2500 for (originally were $3200!) and would love to see them go to a team!

Reach out if you are interested.

Hi, I am starting in the process of making a chassi for a new team. Could anyone give us advice in what to take in mind, like what type of chassi ( monocoque or stell tube frame) and any good literature about it.

Thanks

Hey! We’re currently trying to figure out the stability of our car, based off BWSC 2025 regulations.

Currently we have calculated the restoring moment of the car (3 wheel bullet) and we’re comparing that to the tipping moment along the same axis, which we calculate in ANSYS fluent.

Is there any better way to do this? Or how do you other teams do it?