Collaborate Disseminate
Car manufacturers will often tout a vehicle’s features to appeal to the market, and this often leads to advertisements featuring a cacophony of acronyms and buzzwords to dazzle and confuse …read more Continue reading The Difference Between 4WD and AWD
While plenty of automotive enthusiasts are all about carving corners at the local track days, it’s a special breed that leaves tarmac behind for the dusty trail ahead. If your chosen ride is of the four-wheelin’ variety, here’s how you can modify it to dominate the dirt and mud.
For an electronics person, building the mechanics of a robot — especially a robust robot — can be somewhat daunting. [Jithin] started with an off-the-shelf 4 wheel drive chassis to build an off-road Arduino robot he calls the Badland Brawler. The kit was a bit over $100, but as you can see in the video below, it is pretty substantial, with an enclosed frame and large mud tires.
The remaining parts include an Arduino, a battery, and a motor driver IC. The Arduino is one with WiFi (an MKR 1000, in fact) and there’s a phone app for controlling the …read more
Continue reading Badland Brawler Lets Arduino Tackle Terrain
When we want to build something to go where wheels could not, the typical solution is to use tracks. But the greater mobility comes with trade-offs: one example being tracked vehicles can’t go as fast as a wheeled counterpart. Information released by DARPA’s ground experimental vehicle technology (GXV-T) program showed what might come out of asking “why can’t we switch to tracks just when we need them?”
This ambitious goal to literally reinvent the wheel was tackled by Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center. They delivered the “Reconfigurable Wheel-Track” (RWT) that can either roll like a wheel or travel on …read more
Continue reading When The Going Gets Tough, These Wheels Transform To Tracks
If you know me at all, you know I’m a car guy. I’m pretty green as far as hardcore wrenching skills go, but I like to tackle problems with my vehicles myself – I like to learn by doing. What follows is the story of how I learned a few hard lessons when my faithful ride died slowly and painfully in my arms over the final months of 2016.
For context, my beast of a machine was a 1992 Daihatsu Feroza. It’s a 4WD with a 1.6 litre fuel injected four-cylinder engine. It had served me faithfully for over a …read more
Continue reading Fixing My 4×4: The Battle of the Bent Valves