Perhaps the biggest advantage that Ember will have over our last car Sockeye is the array. Sockeye raced and won with half the regulation size at 4 square meters of solar cells. Ember is projected to include 57% more at a minor cost to aerodynamic efficiency. We will hand soldering the array in-house again with cells from Maxeon Solar Technologies.

The mechanical work of Ember is split up into two sections: Frame and Suspension. For the frame, Ember will be made out of carbon fiber honeycomb, similar to Sockeye. One huge change to our design philosophy this year is that Ember will be a three wheeled car, in order to save weight on suspension and to decrease rolling resistance. Because of this our mechanical team has had to come up with new ways to support the cars weight while keeping supports light.

On Sockeye, the electrical system included a mix of different communication protocols, that caused us a lot of problems. This year, we experimented with a lot of different systems, and eventually settled on the automotive industry standard CAN bus network. Because of this we have made a new system that is modular and should be more reliable. In addition we are also figuring out ways to reduce power consumption in order to keep our suplemental batteries working longer.

Due to the sweeping electrical changes, no previous code can be reused, so we will be writing a full software system this year. This year we hope to adress issues we faced in the past such as documentation and communication between programmers. In addition we are also restructuring the way we send data to our strategy team by integrating an ESP32