The FSG Workshops - An (unknown) source of knowledge

On 2nd of November this year the 14th FSG Workshop was held in Abstatt at Bosch Engineering. One to two of these workshops are held annually, bringing the teams and officials closer together and spreading knowledge among the participants.

What we can (not) learn from F1: Driver-Car-Interfacing - Part2: Changing Mechatronic Parameters

This is the second part of the Driver-Car-Interfacing post, this time about changing mechatronic parameters. Part 1 about visualisation can be found here.

PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just built on my experience as former participant and current official.

The posts subject line says "mechatronic parameters", so we should start with thinking about possible mechatronic parameters that have be changed on an FS car. There are none...that might sound a bit pragmatic, but technically (and assuming a perfect world) there is no need to change any mechatronic parameter during a dynamic event. However, in order to optimise the total points gained or just to survive Endurance there are many arguments to change mechatronic parameters while driving.

What we can (not) learn from F1: Driver-Car-Interfacing - Part1: Visualisation

Many teams get inspiration for parts of their car from F1 or other racing series. I am not saying that this is a bad thing in general, but whenever you are thinking of copying or carrying over ideas from somewhere else, you still have to question why it has been designed the way it is. These "What we can (not) learn from.." posts will critically and hopefully objectively assess things done in other engineering areas and evaluate whether it is good or bad to just take over the respective parts/ideas or whether FS needs a different approach.
PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just build on my experience as former participant and current official.

This post is about Driver-Car-Interfacing. It is not about ergonomics, but about the driver exchanging information with the car and vice-versa. Back in the days there were mechanical gauges showing the current coolant temperature to the driver and the driver may have been able to open and close valves to change some kind of vehicle behaviour. Nowadays this usually goes electronically via displays, lights, buttons and switches. Therefore I will focus on dashboard and steering wheel design with respect to information transfer in this post.

Statistics, Statistics, Statistics: FSG Acceleration through the years

The Acceleration event is probably the dynamic event which is most comparable over the years at FSG. It has been conducted on the exact same part of the Hockenheimring since 2007 and we also did not change the surroundings like we did for WetPad for example. Thus I figured that it is worth to take a closer look at the results of the Acceleration event from 2007 to now. Just to see, if there are any surprising conclusions from doing that.

A word about this kind of posts (statistics involved): All shown data has of course been pre-processed in some way by me and/or others. I do my best to always tell you, what I have done with the data, but nobody is perfect. So always take the provided data with a grain of salt. And there is one more thing about statistics, which is well covered by my favourite statistics (and probably nerdiest ever) joke:

Rules Corner: Possible Rules Changes for 2015 - Noise Test

Most of you have probably noticed the following part in the "Possible Future Rules Changes" part of the rules:

T15.8  Noise Test – To improve the sound quality of single cylinder engines for track workers the sound measuring units may be changed to dBC. This is more consistent with human hearing at the higher volumes called out in the rules. Cheap, commercially available sound meters are generally able to display dBC. The committee is also considering a reduction in the noise level.

Rules Corner: FSAE2014 Changelog, Parts S and D

This is the third and last part of my FSAE2014 rules changelog. This time it is about the parts S and D.
The first post about the FSAE2014 rule parts A, T, AF and IC can be found here.
The second post about the EV part can be found here.

Disclaimer:
I have thoroughly compiled the changed rules, but there is no guarantee that these are complete or that there won't be another release which might make this compilation obsolete. So make sure to keep up to date when new rules are released. Although I will probably post another blog entry, if there is an update to the rules.

For the impatient, these are the rules you have to check out:

Rules Corner: FSAE2014 Changelog, Part EV

This is the second part of my FSAE2014 rules changelog. This time it is about the EV rules. Due to the many changes I decided to give the EV part its own post.
The first post about the FSAE2014 rule parts A, T, AF and IC can be found here.
A third post containing the changes in parts S and D will follow soon.

Disclaimer:
I have thoroughly compiled the changed rules, but there is no guarantee that these are complete or that there won't be another release which might make this compilation obsolete. So make sure to keep up to date when new rules are released. Although I will probably post another blog entry, if there is an update to the rules.

For the impatient, these are the rules you have to check out:

Rules Corner: FSAE2014 Changelog, Parts A,T,AF and IC

About one week ago the first version of the FSAE2014 rules was released. The FSAE rules have moved to a 2 year rules cycle starting in 2013 such that only in odd years major changes will be made to the regulations. Therefore, the 2014 FSAE rules changes are mostly small corrections or clarifications except for the EV regulations.

However, the FSAE rules do not include a detailed changelog, which I honestly do not understand. I will try to change that in future, especially since we moved the rules document to dynamic referencing in 2013 when we integrated the EV rules. That should make it really easy to automatically create a changelog. On the other hand it will probably prevent the teams from completely reading the rules every year which could harm the quality of the cars, at least with respect to passing Scrutineering.

Now back to business: I have thoroughly compiled the changed rules, but there is no guarantee that these are complete or that there won't be another release which might make this compilation obsolete. So make sure to keep up to date when new rules are released. Although I will probably post another blog entry, if there is an update to the rules.

For the impatient, these are the rules you have to check out:

Why I decided to start a blog

Back in autumn 2008, I was asked by the board (I will tell you what the board is in another post) of Formula Student Germany, if I wanted to participate in developing rules for an Electric FS class.

Some of my first thoughts were: How could I make a difference as an Official? What was missing in terms of information delivered about the reasoning behind ?

One of the answers was/is: The structure and the work of the rules committee and also the organisational structures/work of the Officials of the FS competitions always lacked transparency for me.

The rules committee (I will also write about that in the future) for example was a big grey cloud and each released rules version made me often scratch my head and think: