Building an Electric Scooter That’s Street Legal, Even in Germany

Sometimes a successful project isn’t only about making sure all the electrons are in the right place at the right time, or building something that won’t collapse under its own weight. A lot of projects involve a fair amount of social engineering to be counted as a success, especially those that might result in arrest and incarceration if built as originally planned. Such projects are often referred to as “the fun ones.”

For the past few months, we’ve been following [Bitluni]’s DIY electric scooter build, which had been following the usual trajectory for these things – take a stock unpowered …read more

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Need A Hand? How About Two?

A helping hand goes a long way to accomplishing a task. Sometimes that comes in the form of a friend, and sometimes it’s a pair of robotic hands attached to your arm.

Italian startup [Youbionic] have developed this pair of 3D printed hands which aim to extend the user’s multi-tasking capacity. Strapped to the forearm and extending past the user’s natural hand, they are individually operated by flexing either the index or ring fingers. This motion is picked up by a pair of flex sensor strips — a sharp movement will close the fist, while a slower shift will close …read more

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The Hackaday Prize: An Open Electric Wheelchair

[Irene Sans] and [Alvaro Ferrán Cifuentes] feel that electric wheelchairs are still too expensive. On top of that, as each person’s needs are a little different, usually don’t exactly fit the problems a wheelchair user might face. To this end they’ve begun the process of creating an open wheelchair design which they’ve appropriately dubbed OpenChair.

As has been shown in the Hackaday Prize before, there’s a lot of things left to be desired in the assistive space. Things are generally expensive. This would be fine, but often insurance doesn’t cover it or it’s out of the range of those in developing …read more

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