Solar Speeder 1.1

The SolarSpeeder is a small solar powered car. The SolarSpeeder is classified as a BEAM robot, meaning the least amount of electronics are used and parts are preferably recycled (walkmans, pagers, etc.) and solar powered.

About

The speeder will sit in the sun and charge the capacitor for about 40 seconds. Once the voltage in the capacitor reaches 2 volts it will discharge into the motor sending the little car zooming off. These things are pretty quick and can cover some nice distance. The website says they will do about 10 feet, but I'm almost positive mine traveled farther than that. Sometime I'm bored I'll bust out the tape measure.

No, I didn't invent or create this from scratch. I got a kit from solarbotics.com for $25 and just soldered it together. After pricing out all the parts I needed it came to about the same price as the kit, so Ii opted for the kit. They have a ton of other kits and parts as well. I highly recommend checking them out if you are at all interested in this sort of stuff. You can get good parts virtually anywhere and it's a lot of fun.

My thoughts

Piecing this together was a lot of fun; A good learning experience. Tracing through the circuits to understand how it works has gotten me even more interested in circuits and circuit design. As soon as I can free up some time I will probably take a couple circuit design classes for fun. I think my goal is to create an autonomous robot, or at least gain an understanding of how they work.