Principles and Practices - The Final Project Idea

So for the first assignment we have to think about a potential final project, and we have to sketch it... Well, truth be told, I've had this idea for a while now. It's time to make it a reality.

What you are about to read is a very crazy, very freaky, very particular developement for a niche market. I'ts made for car designers, by car designers, and trust me, we are very unusual people. Chris Bangle, BMW's former head of design, said once "Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose". Well, this project may be an unnecessary developement, a bit like Chris Bangle's carpet, but I'm unusual, I believe in this idea, and as Neil said, "A FabLab is a safe place for unusual people", so from the tranquility of my FabLab, here's the topic: I want to modernise the early stages in Concept Car Prototyping.

In order to do that, I want to create a car prototype scaled model with different interchangeable parts. Each part would contain some kind of information, and that information could be shared with the main structure or the car body, so the designers working on the model would know in that moment what kind of parts is the model made of.

Wether it's going to be with RFID, barcodes or whatever, it's not yet decided, but I know I want a car model with different interchangeable parts, and I know I'd like to use different FabLab machines and techniques to create each one of the different parts.

First I'm going show you the initial sketch and I'll go through a couple of clarifications but I'll document the rest of the progress week by week here.

This project is going to take me a very long time. As I'm originally planning on building a 1:5 scale model car just to show the system working on its real environment, it's going to take a lot of CAD time. Then, there's the material. I will probably have to go through 10 kg of filament to make all the 3D printed parts, plus I want to create the wheels in resin, and the base in milled and laser cut wood. I'm going to need RFID chips and sensors, and an Arduino or similar board to be able to control all the system. I'm going to need a screeen to display the data. And of course a huge space to build the model itself, as a 1:5 model car is about one meter long...

Are you ready? Buckle up! It's going to be a thrilling semester!