Interactive Intro to Aerodynamics/CFD by Local Motors

If you are interested in automotive design and looking to develop a better intuitive grasp of aerodynamics, today is your lucky day.

PeterBuilt is sponsoring a design competition for the next Big Rig via the Local Motors Forge, a place where interested members of the online open source community can go to work and play at vehicle design.

The Local Motors website is encouraging visitors to download Project Falcon, and use it to play around with edgy new Big Rig designs for the Peterbuilt design competition.  Project Falcon is a new and at least temporarily free piece of wind tunnel simulation software that allows for interactive investigation of the aerodynamic performance of designs, and is intended to be used early in the conceptual design phase. Project Falcon reads .STL files, so you have a lot of options for CAD software to model your ideas. The goal is to find a design that will look good and increase fuel economy by achieving greater aerodynamic optimization of the vehicle. The motivation?  10 Awards, and $15,000 in prizes.

The design submission period is June 5th - June 26th.

Here's the video via Local Motors:




Project Falcon may also be a great tool for those of you looking to get into Open Source Aircraft design.

Look out for a future post with more details on Project Falcon software.

Collaborate on Open Source Hardware Design at CERN's Open Hardware Repository

Much in the spirit of the open source software movement, the Open Hardware Repository is a place on the web for electronics designers to collaborate on open source hardware designs.

The creators of the OHR see peer review, design re-use, improved industry collaboration, better hardware, and a more fun design process as the primary benefits of their collaborative approach. I could not agree more.

I am impressed by the organization and functionality of the OHR collaboration tools. Each project has its own main hub page with tabs for project overview, wiki, activity, mailing list, issues, news, documents, files, and repository.  Each project has a project manager, and a list of developers.  OHR requires the sharing of anything it would take to duplicate each design, and encourages the sharing of all related files.

You can check out the features of their project collaboration platform by browsing the hub for this 5-bit port digital IO card in FMC form-factor.

 Each project is licensed through one of the following licenses featured on the OHR licenses page which links to info on the CERN Open Hardware License (CERN OHL), the GNU General Public License (GPL), the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and the TAPR Open hardware License (TAPR OHL).

While I really liked what I saw at the OHR, there is one small catch:  To use the OHR tools for collaborating on hardware designs, the designs must "present an interest to the community of electronics designers for experimental physics facilities."  As the OHR manifesto points out, the target community is broad and diverse enough that the "of interest to the community" constraint is unlikely to be excessively constraining.