Category Archives: transportation hacks

Tesla Model 3 Battery Pack Teardown

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The Tesla Model 3 has been available for almost a year now, and hackers and tinkerers all over the world are eager to dig into Elon’s latest ride to see what makes it tick. But while it’s considerably cheaper than the Model S that came before it, the $35,000+ USD price tag on the new Tesla is still a bit too high to buy one just to take it apart. So for budget conscious grease monkeys, the only thing to do is wait until somebody with more money than you crashes one and then buy the wreckage cheaply.

Which is …read more

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[GreatScott] Tests His DIY Battery Pack On His E-Bike

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[GreatScott] has now joined the ranks of Electric Bike users. Or has he? We previously covered how he made his own lithium-ion battery pack to see if doing so would be cheaper than buying a commercially made one. But while it powered his E-bike conversion kit on his benchtop, turning the motor while the wheel was mounted in a vice, that’s no substitution for a real-world test with him on a bike on the road.

Since then he’s designed and 3D printed an enclosure for his DIY battery pack and mounted it on his bike along with most of the …read more

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Animated Bluetooth Bike Turn Signals

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Tired of risking his life every time he had to signal a turn using his hands while riding his bicycle in rainy Vancouver, [Simon Wong] decided he needed something a bit higher tech. But rather than buy something off the shelf, he decided to make it into his first serious Arduino project. Given the final results and the laundry list of features, we’d say he really knocked this one out of the park. If this is him getting started, we’re very keen to see where he goes from here.

So what makes these turn signals so special? Well for one, …read more

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Spared No Expense: Cloning The Jurassic Park Explorer

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While you’d be hard pressed to find any serious figures on such things, we’d wager there’s never been a vehicle from a TV show or movie that has been duplicated by fans more than the Staff Jeeps from Jurassic Park. Which is no great surprise: not only do they look cool, but it’s a relatively easy build. A decent paint job and some stickers will turn a stock Wrangler into a “JP Jeep” that John Hammond himself would be proud of.

While no less iconic, there are far fewer DIY builds of the highly customized Ford Explorer “Tour Vehicles”. …read more

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Build Your Own Avionics Suite, If You Dare

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If you’re really interested in aircraft and flying, there are many ways to explore that interest. There are models of a wide range of sizes and complexities that are powered and remote-controlled, and even some small lightweight aircraft that can get you airborne yourself for a minimum of expense. If you’re lucky enough to have your own proper airplane, though, and you’re really into open source projects, you can also replace your airplane’s avionics kit with your own open source one.

Avionics are the electronics that control and monitor the aircraft, and they’re a significant part of the aircraft’s ability …read more

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Save the Tally Ho: Rebuilding a Historic Yacht

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[Leo Sampson Goolden] is a boatbuilder and Sailor. He’s a prime example of a dwindling group of shipwrights who build sailing vessels the traditional way. In 2017, he was given the opportunity to buy Tally Ho, a Yacht built back in 1910. Once a proud ship, Tally Ho now sat as a shell under a shrink-wrap tarp. Her deck was rotted, her keel cracked. Any sane person would have moved on. Thankfully [Leo] is not quite sane, and began a quest to bring this history ship back to its former glory.

Tally Ho isn’t just an old boat. She is …read more

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3000W Unicycle’s Only Limitation Is “Personal Courage”

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Electric vehicles are fertile ground for innovation because the availability of suitable motors, controllers, and power sources makes experimentation accessible even to hobbyists. Even so, [John Dingley] has been working on such vehicles since about 2009, and his latest self-balancing electric unicycle really raises the bar by multiple notches. It sports a monstrous 3000 Watt brushless hub motor intended for an electric motorcycle, and [John] was able to add numerous touches such as voice feedback and 1950’s styling using surplus aircraft and motorcycle parts. To steer, the frame changes shape slightly with help of the handlebars to allow the driver’s …read more

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GuerillaClock Could Save This City Thousands

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They say necessity is the mother of invention. But if the thing you need has already been invented but is extremely expensive, another mother of invention might be budget overruns. That was the case when [klinstifen]’s local government decided to put in countdown clocks at bus stops, at a whopping $25,000 per clock. Thinking that was a little extreme, he decided to build his own with a much smaller price tag.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W as its core, and a 16×32 RGB LED matrix for a display. Some of the work is done already, since the …read more

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Keeping Streets Ice-Free with the Raspberry Pi

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[Revanth Kailashnath] writes in to tell us about an interesting project he and his team have been working on for their “Real Time Embedded Programming” class at the University of Glasgow. Intended to combat the harsh and dangerous winters in Glasgow, their system uses a Raspberry Pi and a suite of sensors to automatically deploy a brine solution to streets and sidewalks. While the project is still only a proof of concept and hasn’t been deployed, the work the team has done so far runs the gamut from developing their own PCBs to creating a web-based user interface.

The core …read more

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Self-Driven: Uber and Tesla

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Self-driving cars have been in the news a lot in the past two weeks. Uber’s self-driving taxi hit and killed a pedestrian on March 18, and just a few days later a Tesla running in “autopilot” mode slammed into a road barrier at full speed, killing the driver. In both cases, there was a human driver who was supposed to be watching over the shoulder of the machine, but in the Uber case the driver appears to have been distracted and in the Tesla case, the driver had hands off the steering wheel for six seconds prior to the crash. …read more

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