On Wednesday evening we met for another design workshop. The focus this week was on the dimensions of the vehicle’s body. Here’s the result of our efforts:
Archive | March, 2013
Two Seater Renewable Energy Vehicle (Trev)
24 MarThe African Solar Taxi project has its technical origins in work originally undertaken at the University of South Australia, which was later extended by a motley collection of tinkerers and adventurers called Team Trev.
This video introduces Trev and shows it in action on the streets of Adelaide:
http://vimeo.com/groups/47/videos/62135765
Trev. It’s green.
Team member profile: Enias Marama
19 Mar
My name is Enias Marama and I am 60 years old. I am a Public Health Officer trained at Loughborough University of Technology in the UK. I have been working in Zimbabwe with the Italian Non Goverment Organisation CESVI since 2001.
During my time at CESVI, we helped to pioneer the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) in a rural setting in Zimbabwe. Initially, HIV testing facilities were only centralised at a few national hospitals in major cities. Antiretroviral treatment (ARV) for those HIV positive was not available. Those testing HIV positive were often sent back to their rural homes to die.
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Wheels and tub
13 MarIn the design of the African Solar Taxi, we aim to use as many off the shelf components as possible, to minimise the time, effort and expense of making custom components. In essence, we seek to ‘mash up’ the best readily available components into a new design and to strive for elegant simplicity.
When seeking to avoid reinventing the wheel, it is appropriate that the first major component we have selected is the wheel. At last night’s design workshop we considered a range of ATV, motorbike and downhill mountain bike wheels and we agreed that we’d use lightweight ATV tyres on pressed aluminium ATV rims, like this:
Early design decisions
11 MarDesign is a process of understanding the requirements, developing and assessing the options and making design decisions.
Some of the design decisions we have made so far include: Continue reading
Second design workshop
7 MarLast night 11 members of our design team came together for another technical design workshop. It was a really productive night.
