Disclaimer
Information on this blog is raw and sometimes unverified reporting straight from the road by teams. The event will issue a media release for any events requiring an official notification.
Note that links in blog entries are not maintained, so while a link may be verified to work on the day of publishing, this is not guaranteed beyond that day.
The new-look World Solar Challenge website has just gone live - we're proud of it and look forward to your patronage.
Things to note:
- This BLOG will continue to be used for announcements relating to the event, and closer to the event we hope to have a few guest bloggers join the ranks.
- There is now a dedicated YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/worldsolarchallenge
- Shortly we'll be posting photos from past events online and you'll be able to browse and download these photos for your enjoyment.
- The Yahoo! mailing list continues to be used for interested people, both participants and spectators. If this is your first Challenge, it's a good place to search for and ask the myriad questions you'll come up against: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wsc/
As you might know we're intending to provide satellite tracking for each solar-team in the 2011 event - it's been a long time in the making and we're very excited with the insights this will give spectators across the planet - not to mention mum and dad who'll be able to track the progress of their progeny across the country.
The Global Green Challenge has been reborn as the World Eco Challenge - to keep in spirit with the World Solar Challenge and the website at:
http://www.worldecochallenge.org/ is expected to be updated over the next few months.
Enjoy and Be Part of It!
--
Onno Benschop
The car has been fixed!
Currently testing in Alice Springs.
One of the parents in Perth shipped the chip into Alice this morning - Doug extends his thanks!
Update coming!
A former participant reports that a video is available from the BBC web site.
It's got a lovely interview with Chris in the middle and a healthy dose of dubious facts (like the article is "Solar energy: A sun-powered car race"
Arrived Alice Springs at 16:30.
Reports 120km North of Alice Springs, traveling well at 100km/hr.
They expect to arrive Alice Springs at 16:00 today.
Out hosting company Internode came through. We're all good.
Sometimes success has its own challenges.
From a technical perspective, the website is running on a MySQL database server and it started reporting "Too Many Connections" early this morning.
I contacted the hosting company Internode who attempted to increase the number of connections then restarted the server. Unfortunately the server did not restart.
Currently Internode is working behind the scenes to fix this problem. I've put up a message on the site to show this outage, but unfortunately some of you will not see that message, instead you'll see a database connection error instead.
As we have information, I'll add it here.
As an interim measure I'll post Control Stop times here as they arrive.
--Onno
Sorry folks, the web site is down at the moment. Rest assured that we're working tirelessly on it.
--Onno
Reports from the Challenge indicate that the University of Michigan have crashed their Solar Vehicle into their support vehicle. Severe damage to their vehicle has been reported.
This report has not yet been confirmed.
