Saturday, September 6, 2008

Measurement Concept


I am designing something that measures the roughness of the surface of a car and then tells the user whether it needs a polish or not, because its hard to tell whether a car needs a polish by eye or touch. My concept uses a laser undernieth to determine the roughness of the surface, and then displays the results...on the display. At the moment my concept doesnt really look like its been designed style wise, but I am working on how the display will show the results and how it works overall.
Marco

5 comments:

Student Contributor said...

Hey, interesting idea. However I'm just wondering why you need to polish a surface if for all intents and purposes (by sight and touch) it is smooth enough.

Also how it works sounds similar to how some microscopes work but you might like to try staying away from simply a device with a screen. What about a device that 'magnifies' the surface underneath so you can see/touch it more easily? No idea how that would work though.

However it goes, good luck.

Sunny

Student Contributor said...

it might be possible to incorporate the polishing system into the device so that if it needs polishing, it gets polished. not sure that lasers are what your looking for here, something like a scanner (as in computer) would be much cheaper and probably do a better job of a surface, otherwise in the aerospace industry they use ink because it "finds" rough surfaces so that would highlight bits to be polished and maybe you could go over it with a ink detecting polisher?

Student Contributor said...

sorry, last comment was by Andrew vdm

Student Contributor said...

hey, I think the idea sounds great.
I think u could get like a magnifying glass would be cool. Or maybe work on the shape of the product, it could be more fun.

Nancy=]

Robbie said...

The measurement would not really be optical - it's hard to detect smoothness/polish depth remaining just be looking. How does the laser measure the thickness?

For the record, and to answer Sunny's question - polish protects the paint and makes the car look nice and shiny - yes this is a product for car enthusiasts, but that's a massive market.

-Robbie