Inter Solar North America - San Francisco

So, this week the Spartan Team went to San Francisco to attend to Inter Solar North America conference. It was a great experience to learn more about solar energy and check all those exhibitions.

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One of our goals was to talk to representants of those companies to get them interested in our project. I've talked to a couple of them and their work is impressive.

I got business cards from two companies: HARD - Fastening Systems & Sealants; and PLP preformed line products.

I was approached by Engineer Nerenberg who is also director of supply chain and operations at HARD, he noticed that I was speaking portuguese and came to talk to me. He is also from Brazil and showed interest at our project. Here is his contacts: mario.nerenberg@hard.com.br / +55 (47) 4009-7238 | +55 (47) 9657-1365.

The other person I spoke to is Fred Reardon, Field Sales Manager at PLP, he gave me his contact as well and his company has a nice work, and might be a good choice to help us develop our track. I guess they can adapt solar panels into our track with efficiency. His contacts are: +1 (310) 749-0807 | freardon@preformed.com | www.dpwsolar.com

Phases plan

This past week I was encharged of working in a new idea, a plan divided in phases.
The objective of the phases plan is to focus to build the actual track separately. In phase one we would accomplish our first objective that is connect the two campus.

In phase 2, the idea is to expand the network to attend most of the population living downtown between the campuses.

And finally phase 3 would link the network to points of interest:

Route to San Jose airport.

Route to Tamien station and grocery store (walmart showed as an example).

Route passing through future student housing.

 I also wanted to post a sketch that shows the length of a ground floor station that starts going down over the street (traffic lights would be needed) in order to save some space in the sidewalks.

I'm not an expert on CAD, but I think this simple drawing can give an idea of how an station would occupy space of the sidewalk if it is ground floor.

Ideas for the routes

 So far we came up with some ideas of where our track could pass under the freeway in order to get to south campus, we found some possible spots and we are analysing if they are viable. The first ones are the alleys between 1st w/ 2nd, and 2nd w/ 3rd streets, the others are 5th, 7th streets, 10th w/ 11th st, Coyote creek and the Coyote creek trail.

There are some issues that we have to consider yet with each of the spots, and that's what we're going to work on for now and discuss it with the professors.

My life in US

Hey, here is a headshot of me, I'm going to use this blog to show a little of myself and my life, stuff that I like to do and some experiences that I had.











I really like to travel.
Since I moved to United States I've been in plenty of places around. In february I went to New Orleans with a couple of friends, we partied a lot during Mardi Gras and it was really fun.
Now I just moved to San Jose, California, it's pretty good here, I made a road trip with friends through California's coast and it was awesome.
So far California is my favorite place here.

First week at Spartan Superway

This week has been my actual first week working on the project, so far me and the others civil engineering students are working on the test track and a design for the actual track to connect SJSU campus to the south campus.

Hello, I'm Allan. I came from Brazil as a exchange student in US and it's been such an experience... Well, in a month I'm moving to California to be part of a team in the Spartan Superway project at SJSU. Wish me luck.