Tuesday 22 October 2013

What we can (not) learn from F1: Driver-Car-Interfacing - Part2: Changing Mechatronic Parameters

This is the second part of the Driver-Car-Interfacing post, this time about changing mechatronic parameters. Part 1 about visualisation can be found here.

PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just built on my experience as former participant and current official.

The posts subject line says "mechatronic parameters", so we should start with thinking about possible mechatronic parameters that have be changed on an FS car. There are none...that might sound a bit pragmatic, but technically (and assuming a perfect world) there is no need to change any mechatronic parameter during a dynamic event. However, in order to optimise the total points gained or just to survive Endurance there are many arguments to change mechatronic parameters while driving.


Friday 4 October 2013

What we can (not) learn from F1: Driver-Car-Interfacing - Part1: Visualisation

Many teams get inspiration for parts of their car from F1 or other racing series. I am not saying that this is a bad thing in general, but whenever you are thinking of copying or carrying over ideas from somewhere else, you still have to question why it has been designed the way it is. These "What we can (not) learn from.." posts will critically and hopefully objectively assess things done in other engineering areas and evaluate whether it is good or bad to just take over the respective parts/ideas or whether FS needs a different approach.
PLEASE NOTE: These are my personal findings. Acting according to these posts does not gain you any points in the design event or guarantee a trouble free season/event etc. It is just build on my experience as former participant and current official.

This post is about Driver-Car-Interfacing. It is not about ergonomics, but about the driver exchanging information with the car and vice-versa. Back in the days there were mechanical gauges showing the current coolant temperature to the driver and the driver may have been able to open and close valves to change some kind of vehicle behaviour. Nowadays this usually goes electronically via displays, lights, buttons and switches. Therefore I will focus on dashboard and steering wheel design with respect to information transfer in this post.