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The lab, 05

The Logbook

The Logbook is an idea further down Find a Drive's road: a small device that plugs into a car and keeps its diary, recording every drive. Nothing's been made. So we built it in Blender, the 3D modelling program, part by part, at the size Find a Drive's website draws it, and rendered it as if it had been.

Made for
Find a Drive, our app for finding and planning great drives
When
October 2026
Made with
Blender and its Cycles renderer, three.js for the model here, and a little arithmetic on light

Take it apart

This is the Logbook as we modelled it, every part in place. Drag it to turn it, slide it apart along its construction lines, and choose its lid and its light. Its one light is the ring on top of the F, Find a Drive's mark, and it lights in the colour you chose for your Find a Drive card.

Lid
Light
The light's colour
Lid
Zirconia ceramic, bead-blasted to a satin, with a polished edge: ceramic rather than metal, so the GPS can still see the sky through it.
Light pipe
A clear rod from a light on the board up into the ring on top of the F, the Logbook's one light.
Board
GPS with its own ceramic antenna, a motion sensor, Bluetooth, and a chip to listen to the car's own network.
Base
Glass-filled polycarbonate, with a fine matt finish. Four Torx screws hold it to the lid, with no glue, so it opens.
Plug
The standard diagnostic socket every car has had since the early 2000s, with five of its sixteen contacts fitted: power, two grounds, and the pair that carry the car's data.
The Logbook with its ink lid, leaning on its plug, Find a Drive's F pressed into the lid
In inkLeaning on its plug, as it would on a desk. The ink lid's F is polished into the satin; the paper lid's is pressed in and inked, like letterpress.
Find a Drive's F pressed into the ink lid, close up, the ring on top of it lit
Up closeThe F pressed three-tenths of a millimetre into the lid, and the light filling its ring.
The Logbook's lid at night, the ring on top of the F glowing
By nightUnder the dashboard in the dark: all you'd see of it, and only while it records.

Its light, in your colour

Each photograph was rendered twice: once with the light off, and once with nothing but the light, four stops darker, a sixteenth of the exposure, so its brightest part never turns to plain white. The second becomes a stencil, with a soft glow worked in. On the page, the stencil is filled with your colour and laid over the first picture by screen blending, which adds light the way light adds.

A paint is a surface colour, though, too dark to glow: racing green as a light would be nearly black. So each colour is brought up to full strength first, keeping its hue, and racing green glows green.

Specified like a product

Size
64 by 40 millimetres and 17 deep, as Find a Drive's website draws it, its corners rounded to a radius of 10 millimetres.
The lid
Zirconia ceramic, bead-blasted to a satin with a polished edge: ceramic rather than metal, so the GPS can still see the sky through it.
The F
Pressed 0.3 millimetres into the lid, and polished bright against the satin round it.
The light
A clear rod carries light from the board up into the ring on top of the F, the Logbook's one light.
The base
Glass-filled polycarbonate, held by four Torx screws, with no glue, so it can be opened.
The board
58 by 34 millimetres, with about fifty parts placed on it: a ceramic antenna for the GPS, Bluetooth, a motion sensor, and a chip to listen to the car's own network.

A prototype on paper

Modelling a thing that doesn't exist yet is a way of finding out whether it should. The model asked the questions a maker would: what the lid's made of if the GPS must see through it, how the light gets from the board to the ring, how it comes apart. It's a prototype on paper, not in a box: everything here is rendered, and nothing's been made.

More from the lab

Everything in the lab

Contact

Talk through your project.

Tell us what you'd like to build, or what's getting in the way. A few lines is plenty to start with, and the first conversation is free.

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