Need ideas to make simple watthour meter for ePower race

[TylerDurden]

Herrsprocket will ask if he needs help from us... he's a "big guy" and is politically smooth enough to manage the races at Portland International Raceway so let him figure out what he wants to do.

That position confirms that safe's participation in this thread has been a useless and misleading waste of everyone's time.

 

[safe]

"But officer...

I thought that it was just a 'meter'.

I had no idea that there were going to be restrictions tied to it.

Couldn't you just let me off this one time?" :lol:

 

[swbluto]

Uhhh... wasn't his original intention to allow people to watch their "battery usage" as opposed to the average power used throughout the race to separate people on the basis of their "power class"? That'd seem a poor implementation of limiting power...

 

[safe]

Uhhh... wasn't his original intention to allow people to watch their "battery usage" as opposed to the average power used throughout the race to separate people on the basis of their "power class"? That'd seem a poor implementation of limiting power...

I think the ideas have "evolved". In the beginning they did what everyone seems to do (the naive first attempt) and looked at the battery as the way to define racing classes. You could have an SLA battery of a certain size or a NiCad of another, etc... After a while trying to get something that is fair is both complicated and unlikely to be able to actually deliver fair racing.

There are certain goals...

The first "goal" is that efficiency should be encouraged so that the most efficient machines are victorious over the less so. This follows the trends in the Formula One car racing with the KERS system that requires that next year the race cars must recapture some of their energy while racing making them more efficient.

The second "goal" was simplicity. Too many classes and rules were potentially going to make the racing too divided. By narrowing the way that wattage is used it throws out all the old rules that related to battery configuration.

...by limiting the wattage extracted from the battery it still means that the electric vehicle must use it efficiently, so if the input wattage is restricted to 1000 watts it's likely that the actual output would AVERAGE about 750 watts since efficiency losses are spread out over the entire powerband. No one can assume that they can always be perfectly in their most efficient zone all the time. (even with gears it's hard to get it perfect)

So the wattage restrictor approach still is FAITHFUL to the first ideal of promoting the use of highly efficient machines and so in that regard Herrsprocket has never wavered from the first "goal".

Some things are just "so right" that they solve the problem and have no downsides to them. This is one of those cases of a solution that has no negatives. Rarely do things work like that in life.

 

[TylerDurden]

 

[safe]

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. :wink:

(very funny by the way... very expertly done)