Industrial Design

The Range Extender Trailer (RET) is a trailer that can extend the range of a battery electric vehicle (BEV). Users can rent the trailer for holidays to reduce or avoid charging stops during their trip. The assignment focussed on the system perspective of the case and included making a business case to calculate the potential market share and income of this service. An interactive model was made to showcase the effect of design requirements on several technical aspects of the product (for example: the effect of average driving speed on total range).

For this project, I worked in a group of 4 total, a mix of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design Engineering students. Besides the general idea (sketching) and concept generation, my contribution to this project also consisted of creating a business case for the product. The systems engineering perspective of the project was also part of the main focus in this project.

The goal of this project was to translate a grayscale image into a matrix of text characters. I wrote a prototype script in MATLAB as a proof of concept. After seeing the results, I was curious what it would look like on a real time camera feed. While this can be done in MATLAB, I decided to take this project as an opportunity to learn how to develop Android apps. Working on this project has taught me to use the Android Studio development environment and make apps by using the Kotlin programming language.


This app uses the CameraX library to obtain the grayscale values of the camera preview feed. The pixels are then grouped in blocks and for each block the average grayscale value is calculated. Next, this grayscale value is linked to a character in a pre-determined array of text characters. And finally, all characters are displayed in the app on a TextView. The user can take pictures with a long-press on the screen.

  Find the source code on GitHub!

The goal of the haptic stylus is to recreate that characteristic feeling of drawing with a pen (or pencil) on paper. Findings from literature research conclude that the two main factors contributing to this feeling are friction and vibrations. The characteristic friction can already be replicated by using pen tips made from different materials for the stylus, but the vibrations are a result of the pencil tip moving over the texture of a paper sheet—which does not happen on the smooth surface of a drawing tablet. The haptic stylus creates micro vibrations in a pattern that matches speed of the stylus and the type of paper it tries to replicate. By analysing different sheets of paper, different profiles can be set up that mimic multiple pen-paper combinations.

During this project I learned to apply several design methods to design innovative concepts, such as TRIZ or the Delft Innovation Method. The course taught me about the different ways how new technologies can be adopted by a market. Working as a group of 3 IDE students, the goal was to develop a conceptual design of a product-service combination for solar powered EV charging solutions.

The concept was later included in an article in the journal 'Progress in Photovoltaics'.

During this project I worked at Benchmark Electronics to design and test the use of the Microsoft HoloLens (an augmented reality headset) at the manufacturing department. Research has shown that using augmented reality (AR) as a tool for giving assembly instructions can result in a faster assembly time and a lower error rate. There are still several challenges that I investigated, including the increased effort required to create these new type of assembly instructions.

After making a prototype set of instructions for the HoloLens (using the Unity3D engine), I tested the use of this prototype with an assembly operator. I concluded the assignment by giving two different concepts for the implementation of AR in assembly. In this project I got to observe how a real manufacturing environment functions, learn the workflow of a company, learned how to design AR applications and learned how to program these AR applications for the HoloLens.