San Jose Grand Prix

[sciguy125]

If anyone is in the San Jose area and is headed to the grand prix this weekend, look for the NBC11 booth. 1351 built a hot wheels track for them. You can see it in the first picture on this page. (If I can, I'll put up more pictures, but I'm not sure if the team has any at the moment.) The main beneficiary of the San Jose Grand Prix is the Canary Fund (cancer research). As such, the proceeds from our track also to to the Canary Fund. For $3, you get a nifty die-cast formula 1 car and a San Jose Grand Prix pin. You also get to run some cars through the track. All the money goes to the Canary Fund. It's been to a few festivals in the Bay Area over the last few months. The next place it will be is the Grand Prix. After that, it'll be going to a few more festivals. I think it's supposed to retire in September though. (If anyone's interested, I might be able to get the schedule for it.)

An alumnus from our school, who works at NBC11, approached us with the project a little before the Silicon Valley Regional. Of course, we couldn't really work on it until after the regional, so we only had 2 weeks to work on it to meet their deadline. The layout was meant to follow the Grand Prix (but the actual race doesn't have loops...it'd be cooler if it did though...). It's effectively a model (not to scale) of downtown San Jose. However, the block of buildings closest to the start/end is completely made up. In real life, it's an industrial area, so we did our own stuff and used it for sponsor advertising.

The track itself is a jumble of parts from Race Grooves, Hot Wheels starter sets, and homebrew wooden supports. The buildings were cut out of foam, then covered with paper for painting. The accelerators (from the starter sets) were modified to run on a central power supply rather than batteries). The entire thing is mounted on five 3'x5' boards to make it transportable. Sections of track that run over board separations were cut and are rejoined using the standard, removable, track connectors (see the Race Gooves website if you want to see them; some come with the starter sets too). All the wiring runs along the bottom, toward the back, and of course also has connectors at the board separations.

The track was refurbished a couple weeks ago in preparation for the Grand Prix. A transportation mishap early in it's life and normal wear and tear took a heavy toll on it. On-site repairs at the festivals consisted of coins/washers as spacers, pens/screw drivers as supports, and lots of tape/hot glue. After some real repairs though, it runs better than ever.

It was a fun, but stressful build (just like the last 2 weeks of FIRST). It's just a hot wheels track and doesn't look that hard to do, but believe me it is. We had 2 weeks to do EVERYTHING. Planning, designed, acquiring materials, and building were all done in that time. And believe me, there's still alot of engineering in it. The boards have aluminum frames under them so they don't warp. Both tracks originally had the same run time, but after the new repairs it's off because we ran out of time to tweak it. The track and buildings had to coexist so all that had to be planned. The electrical system had an ungodly number of pins that needed to be crimped for the connectors (of course, that was more grunt work than engineering...but it still took days...) Making it transportable was the hardest part. Things had to be planned so that permanent structures weren't over board separations. Things like loops and accelerators had to be placed with consideration to the interboard connections. As far as I know, there's only two places where we had to put something over a separation. One of them was a support that was fixed by just cutting it. The other was a Hot Wheels prefab factory curve section of track that we just had to live with. I think someone figured out how to bend it back and hold it in place for transport. A couple sections of track were also welded together. Apparently, if you set your soldering iron to the correct temperature, you can use it to weld LDPE. Unlike the 2005 robot, however, we were finished when it was shipped to NBC11.

Team members will be manning the track from 9-5 all three days. But, I think NBC11 personnel will be running it a little before and after. Please, drop by and see what we've got.