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RC Motorcycle (Proposal)

This was my initial final project idea.

Currently thinking about making a cool remote control motorcycle toy:

Thinking about how inventions can be more useful to society… considering adapting this project to be larger scale to help beginner motorcycle/scooter riders like so:

Gogoro gyro balance sketch

Another application: Shared electric scooters self-driving to charging stations, recharging, and self re-deploy to hot spots in city to wait for riders. Would require AI self-driving capabilities
Too far into the future
Difficult technically and risky market-wise.
Too many subsystems to engineer within 5 months, not realistic.

Hesitation

Engineering is about elegant solutions. Control moment gyros make sense for multi-million dollar spacecraft, but balancing a two-wheeled vehicle when it could simply just be a three-wheeled vehicle is not an elegant engineering solution.

Failed Ford Gyro project
Lit motors startup stalling (probably failed)
Nimbus 3-wheeled EV mobility solution starting up

Pivot

Remove constraints on myself Yes, who doesn’t want their Fab Lab project to make them a million dollars? Being so focused on making products with “commercial demand” as Thomas Edison so strongly emphasized in his early career, misses the point of Fab Lab and distributed digital fabrication, and sadly takes away from the joy of making and being a maker.

“The killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication. The point was not to make what you could buy in stores; it was to make what you couldn’t—products for a market as small as one person.” -Neil Gershenfeld, Designing Reality, 2017

I want this idea for a product to exist. For myself. Maybe I won’t even like it 6 months after I’ve built it. But at least right now, I know there is at least one customer who wants this product, me. And one is still a viable market size when access to a Fab Lab and digital fabrication literacy is a reality.

So, I will create this product as a piece of art that I want to enjoy, and openly share it digitally with the whole world. If others build it in their Fab Lab and enjoy it too, it would make me feel so happy, but if not, that’s totally okay too because my target market size was always just one.

Yes, I hope my creations out of Fab Lab will help others and improve the world someday like Zipline in Rwanda, but right now I am a student of Fab Academy and I am on my way. My job now is to gain digital fabrication literacy, or at least a strong foundation of it, as much as possible and as fast as possible. Then, in the future I can continue building on my skills while working on more advanced longer-term projects. Getting stuck now with a Final Project that is too complicated would be a hindrance to this goal.

Part of the Fab Academy philosophy is spiral development. I believe it would be better for my education during these 5 months of Fab Academy to experience spiral development with a simpler project that I can build up and expand feature sets of in 3-4 spirals, versus an overly complicated project where I struggle to complete 1.5 spirals by the end.

Simone Giertz is awesome :)


Last update: March 30, 2022