During the Fall Semester of my junior year I helped teach a freshman seminar in design, building, and racing electric gocarts.
The project started the summer before when I built two test gocarts for Professor Leeb of the MIT Laboratory for Electronic and Electromagnetic Systems. We built the gocarts to get an idea how hard the project would be. and the best way to teach the freshman.
In the fall our freshmen were going to build one gocart, and another seminar led by Professor Kirtly were to build another. At the end of the semester there was to be series of races to determine the best gocart. We had planed on having a drag, slalom, and an endurance race. Professor Kirtly's seminar did not finisher their cart on time so the races had to be postponed unit the middle of the second semester.
Our cart won after 2 drag race heats, when the other seminar destroyed there motor control circuits.
Our gocart has a top speed of about 23 MPH!!!
Due to my extremely limited time I have not been able to do a full write up of the project. If you are interesting in seeing my team and our wonder ass kicking cart then go to our seminar's web site at http://web.mit.edu/gocart/www/. The photos on this site were taken by me, but the site was put together by Kailas Narebdran, one of the motivated hard charging freshmen in our seminar.
A few of the better photos of our cart are included below.
The team of Gung Ho freshmen that I helped teach.
A side view of our gocart.
Some of the drawing for the cart that I did in Proengineer.
A close up of our drive mechanism. The motors are 110 VDC motors out of treadmills.
Here is Alex driving our cart during one of our practice runs.