Modularity Sketch - 11th of June, 2009

One of the strongest concepts that are coming up from the discussion of the first phase of this project is modularity.

“In an electric vehicle, modularity can also help owners, to upgrade their vehicles once new technologies come to the market, Want a more powerful motor? Need new batteries? Just swap it. Want to hit the trails on the weekend? Exchange the wheels, take the second passenger seat out and go eat some mud.” quote from project status discussion

The Idea of a plug and play electric vehicle that can be highly customized by a community of designers and suppliers seems quite interesting to me. It will be good to find examples of hardware modularity that can help us in the development of a “hardware framework” to build our vehicle around.

After watching the 24 Hours of Electricross video, I am so looking foward to starting the second phase of this project. I decided that it can be a really exercise to build test model with the main electronics components and get a better understanding of the electric terms that make up an electric vehicle dictionary.

In a conversation with Kees, a fellow engineer at Flex, I got some support on relevant information about building a small test model on the electric components. Yesterday he surprised me with these motors! saying I could use one of them for the test!

Thanks Kees, really nice incentive.

I just finished building my first lego technic project, a motocross of course =) I have to say while building it, I got super excited with the “Lego philosophy” and it’s simplicity. The reason I am posting this here, is to sparkle a modular way of thinking on the contributors of this project and all of the people trying to implement the opensource mindset on a hardware product. I have been reading that the reason that open source software works, is that a piece of code, acts like modules that can be easily refined and combined to achieve different tasks. Look at the opensource content management system wordpress and it’s plugin architecture, any one can work on a  piece of code and write a plugin that realises a special task, that way, anyone can contribute in that problem they want to work the most. After a number of contributions the project tends to grow exponentially, thanks to that is why the Letsevo website exists.

So can we think of developing modules for this electric moped? modules that can be configured in many ways to attend the most various needs…Do you know examples of hardware products already using this principle? It would be great to discuss this idea here with you.

Until then, enjoy my Lego Motocross step by step!