I had the privilege to work on one of the three themed Scion iA’s that Toyota used during the launch of the Scion iA in North America. The Scion iA is a micro four door sedan that is built on top of the Mazda 2 (Demio) platform. It was the first licensed platform used by Toyota for the Scion brand.
The Outcast themed Scion iA was built in corporation with Skybound Entertainment and features a dark and demonized animated show including moving seats, flashing lights, smoke machines and a not-from-this-world sound system.
My involvement in this project was the design and engineering of the entire control system. It involved designing and manufacturing of custom circuit main boards and building the animation software that controlled the entire car. The system is split in 7 individually controlled sub section that features a mix of 32Bit and 8Bit processor units. Each sub section is run by custom firmwares including a custom firmware for the powered steering system that allows to turn the steering wheel in any direction, a 1000 LED Matrix display driver, multiple LED drivers and two relay board proxy boards.
All sub systems are connected via i2c to a Raspberry Pi which contains the animation software on top of a buildroot-based embedded Linux. The animation software itself is written in PHP that communicates in real time with the sub systems.
The total animation time is about 2min and follows the story line of a daemon that possesses the car with the hero eventually fighting the daemon and “removing” it in the process.
The car was prominently featured during the SEMA 2015 show and is used across the world as show car.
Notable articles:
Car & Driver
Topspeed Special
Concept Carz
Official Toyota Specs