Potato Racing!

POTATO RACING
What is potato racing?  Well its something the Children's Hospital Colorado does every year around Saint Patrick's Day for the kids... and adults.  Basically, you get an official racing potato and a pine car racing wheels set and try to build the fastest, coolest, cleverest potato.  There is a beauty contest and a racing contest.  Last year our department entered the three potatoes: the couch from the Simpson's, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a Minion.

2012 Entries

Potato Couch with Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Bart Simpson

Unfortunately, the couch and Sonic ended up racing each other in the first heat.  We did end up getting 2nd in the beauty contest though!

As the department in the hospital with the most engineers, I feel like we should be sweeping the competition by using our design/build super powers.  Time for some over-engineering!

This year since I have access to a laser cutter and machine shop, I decided to make some chassis for our potatoes out of acrylic with carbon fiber tubing for the wheel axles.  Here's a final version of a chassis... not the original design but do to some manufacturing issues this is the first iteration.


For my potato this year I was inspired by the EL wire I found on several electronic parts websites and the movie Tron (since the movie used Vicon motion capture systems, similar to our Vicon MoCap system).  So I decided to make a potato like the motorcycles in the movie.

To start, I traced out all the places I'll be cutting away and carving out.

Outline for chassis

EL Wire outlines and Power Inverter

I purchased some EL wire and an inverter from AdaFruit Industries... once again they have the coolest stuff.       https://www.adafruit.com/products/676

I used a Drumel to carve out the grooves for the EL wire, chassis, and inverter.

EL wire grooves

Next, I painted the potato with black spray paint and drilled holes through the potato for the wheel axles (one of the rules is the axles must pass through potato).  I plugged in 2 AA batteries to the inverter and assembled everything.

I give you... drum roll... Tater Tron and the other 2013 team CGMA entries!

2013 team CGMA entries (Tater Tron, Hungry Caterpiller, Darth Tater, Angry Spuds)

We experimented with our own chassis this year.  Here's the acrylic chassis with carbon tubing for the wheel axles. 

Acrylic chassis, laser cut to precision.

Complete acrylic/carbon fiber chassis

In the spirit of St. Patrick's day, I'd like to say Go n-éirí an bóthar leat (guh n'ayr'ee uhn boehuhr l'aet): "May the road succeed with you!" to all of Tater Tron's competitors.  I think you're going to need it this year :)