Case Studies Client Stories
Designing Tiny Tanks with SOLIDWORKS | Xtreme RC
Xtreme RC have designed an incredible remote-controlled mini-tank that fits in your car! Hear how they managed it with the help of SOLIDWORKS and Solid Solutions.
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Its a tank, first of all, but it's unlike any other tank you've seen It's a very highly specked sports utility tank scaled down to something that, you know, you can fit in your car, So my name is Cam. I'm one of the co-founders here. Xtreme RC Along with my business partner, Luke Simpson. We both met University where we studied mechanical engineering towards the end of our course we discovered one of the US military patents, which was the how and how ripsaw We we thought it I mean, it was a fantastic vehicle. Absolutely. You know, one of the coolest things we had seen and we figured, you know, how great would it be to bring that to to a large number of people. Here we are two years later with our first, you know, prototypes, It's taken us down many different paths that we certainly didn't expect to go down. One of those being, CES back in January, had a fantastic show, three days, nonstop talking, absolutely knackered by the end of it. But the end result was that we had a whole bunch of industry interest, one of the avenues we're exploring at the moment is private security, and we're going to have cameras and Lidar have of them self-driving patrolling, building perimeters where hopefully we can expect to see a lot more interest. hopefully it's a very fun and exciting platform that a lot of people can have fun with. in terms of unique features? Well, where to start is unlike It's Its a tank, first of all, but it's unlike any other tank you've seen unless you've seen the ripsaw which is why most people basically compare it to that. It's a very highly specked sports utility tank scaled down to something that, you know, you can fit in your car, the end result of which is that we've got a very robust platform which has attracted the interest of many customers, industry and consumers. It's running through a couple of specs. first of which we do 40 miles an hour, which seems to surprise a couple of people. So yeah, it will be 40 mile an hour, it weighs around 22 kilos. So Fabius It will carry a payload of 40 kilos, the end result of which is that we've got quite a robust platform for, for a wide range of applications, you know, to have fun with mainly, but for industry, you know, you can put countless things on it from cameras to various different scanning equipment, currently trying to target two different sectors, one being industry customers and other just everyday consumers. are still working very hard trying to get very different concepts to our industry customers. So we've already shipped a few vehicles to certain certain companies in the states, which we're very excited about. we've had a fair number of challenges, in particular in relation to it being a high speed scale tracked vehicle. You know, when you're looking at the ripsaw that's a full size vehicle doing 40 to 60 mile an hour, we're pretty close to those speeds, but one fifth the size. So trying to keep those tracks on is a big challenge. It's been the main focus of development with the vehicle over the last couple of years. The whole the whole design is totally unique from the ground up. And I would say that it has been the main focus of the work. but we've ended up with a very robust platform that is very reliable. The Solid Solutions start up program has been absolutely key to starting the business, there's no way we could have afforded to full blow SOLIDWORKS licenses when we were just in the design initial design stages of our product Without these without the package, we wouldn't have been able to get the product to where it was today. Alongside the two licenses we were given for free, we also were given add ins such a simulation and a flow simulation. Simulation was extremely useful for testing high stress components such as trading arms during job tests to make sure we're going down the right design route and the flow simulation for the internal airflow and the cooling. in particular in the lead up to CES we had a big push to get all our marketing content ready and make sure the vehicle was as reliable as ever been. and visualize. I mean, we didn't even have a finished product, but we were able to show it at CES because we had such powerful tools we could get right in up and close to the vehicle, really show the details we wanted to. So yeah, great, great. addins really. Powerful. We would not have our product this way today without this software. Now the business is a different stage and we can afford to move on to the full blown commercial software. But is is pretty much kickstart our business from scratch. So we found your line back when we saw it. Looking for a SOLIDWORKS provider. honestly, it's been such an easy experience right from day one, We were immediately assigned an entrepreneurs account manager since we met the criteria So I would highly recommend the Entrepreneurs program to any young business looking to get SolidWorks. It has been absolutely critical for us. You know, we are right at the start with a limited budget having come straight out of university. It they make the process just so easy.