June 2010 update.
ADDITIONS TO THE SITE
We have recently added new CAD models of the bodywork of the car. You will find models of the bonnet, doors and glazing. You can see these here.
On the discussion forum, the main topic has been licensing regime that 40 Fires should adopt. This is a vital subject for any project claiming to be open source. Currently, information is made available under a Creative Commons license attribution 3.0 (this is new - previously data on the site was only available for non-commercial purposes, but this is inconsistent with an open source approach and was only ever intended to as a short term measure).
The Creative Commons license works fine as a temporary measure but it is designed for a different purpose and by the time serious on-line development starts we will need something else in place. After some debate, we are heading towards an "academic" style license, similar to the well-known BSD license. If you want to add to the discussions, follow this link
One member of our team, Patrick has written a blog talking about some of the challenges of getting our project off the ground.
WHAT WE'RE UP TO
Our immediate focus is to start an online project to develop an Open Source vehicle controller. The current main ECU is large and expensive, and more sophisticated than the car needs. It is also a proprietary system, so we can't play with it as much as we'd like. We are having discussions with a couple of potential suppliers that we could use and we will let you know more about it shortly.
We have also been having interesting discussions with Dassault Systemes ("DS"), who are a well-established software house. They are developers and distributors of CATIA and ENOVIA, probably the leading CAD/PLM applications in the auto industry. Like us, DS see on-line collaboration as the new frontier of design and are working on developing the right tools to enable this. Of course 40 Fires as a not-for-profit cannot unduly favour any one commercial organisation over any other, and we want anyone in the community to be able to use any CAD tool they like. But we do think that this is an interesting development, since on-line collaboration is reliant on the right tools being available, and the better the tools, the better the output. DS have developed a tool called 3D SwYmer, which they launched this week. According to DS, this application "allows community builders to create and organise their groups within a configurable, secure and ready-to-use environment". If you would like to look at what it can do, follow this link and register on the site - you will see DS has set up a community to examine and discuss 40 Fires data.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
There are no specific tasks to work on this month. If you have any questions for us, do post them on the forum.
UPDATE FROM RIVERSIMPLE
Riversimple, our founding sponsor, was in the news recently when it announced a partnership with Leicester City Council, in the East Midlands area of the UK, to hold a pilot project of 30 hydrogen cars in 2012. This received wide coverage in the press in the UK and worldwide. See some links here:
Daily Telegraph on-line
Green Auto blog
There are other links on the Riversimple site. Look under Media: Latest News.
There is a lot of activity in the workshop at Silverstone, where the demonstrator vehicle continues to undergo extensive tests.
Riversimple board members Hugo Spowers, Steve Evans and Sebastian Piech have been in Melbourne, Australia this week to speak to potential collaborators including state government officials, universities and others.
OTHER NEWS
One noteworthy news story in recent weeks was the announcement of Toyota's plans to make fuel cell powered vehicles available by the year 2015. It claims that these vehicles will be "affordable" at a price of $50,000 (£33,800), with a 2015 target in place for the launch. This would represent a big step forward, although we would comment that relatively few people would find $50,000 "affordable". The challenge for Toyota is that they are constrained by their approach of modifying existing vehicle technology rather than starting from scratch, as Riversimple have done, and by the fact that they insist on selling the vehicle rather than leasing it. By contrast, Riversimple are targeting a lease price of £200-£250 per month for new vehicles with the first vehicles on the road in 2013. If you have any thoughts on this, do add a comment on the discussion forum at www.40fires.org
That's all for now from
The 40 Fires team.
