My favorite 3D printed toy in the making, 3DRacers, has added a new chapter in its race toward a Kickstarter campaign and mass production. With the new online editor now live, you can customize your own car, adding bumpers, spoilers, different wheels, and badass decoration. Then, you can 3D print it yourself or have it 3D printed for you through 3DRacers’ partner service, 3D Hubs.
Though there is more in store, the current version of the editor already makes for a fun and easy 3D printing project. You can select between two types of car bodies, Corvette and Pickup, with two more, Armageddon and DeLorean, made available when you share your model on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. The same goes for the many other additions, of a total of over 100,000 different combinations.
Once you have the car all tuned-up and matching your ideal, you can share it and show it online or you can simply download the .stl files, which come all ready for printing and divided into three folders, according to the suggested color combination. Customizing and 3D printing the toy car is fun and easy: neither the car body nor the accessories require supports and assembling them is, literally, child’s play.
This is, however, is just the first phase. 3DRacers has made its editor widget available for integration into other websites and has kept the project open source as the team’s goal is to grow it into a fully RC 3D printed car racing game, controllable through a smartphone’s bluetooth connection. That means that, in the future, the cars will be assembled with moving parts and an Arduino based control board, with low power consumption and capable of controlling up to two motors, three servos, an embedded RGB LED, battery charger, and a custom made gate/position detector for racing on an official track.
“We designed a car that can race on any surface in your home, to let you build your tracks without limits and race over (or under) sofas, cardboard, tables and beds,” says 3DRacers founder Marco D’alia. “To achieve this, we designed a car that had sufficient clearance and could climb carpets or rough terrains. We also experimented with several DC motors configurations to achieve the correct balance between battery life, power and different steering mechanisms that are both realistic and durable.”
When the electronic and mechanical components are fully integrated, after a presumably successful Kickstarter run, 3DRacers will be able to interface with an Android/iOS App and let users compete with automatic lap counters, pit stops, simulated tire consumption and an online scoreboard, just like in video game. Exactly as demonstrated in the video below:
