Category Archives: transportation hacks

IoT Doorman: Eye-Controlled Door for a Girl with Cerebral Palsy

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Kyleigh has an eye-controlled computer on her wheelchair but something as simple as her bedroom door was still beyond her reach… until now! [Bill Binko], recently filmed a demo of an automatic, IoT door opener built for the young girl with cerebral palsy. [Bill] is a co-founder of ATMakers, an organization that enables makers interested in assistive technologies to collaborate with users to improve quality of life.

Using her eye tracking tablet (PRC Device), Kyleigh has two new icons that make the relevant call to a website, pushing a simple command to either open or close her bedroom door. The …read more

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Asgard: The Open Source Air Data Computer

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We get a lot of awesome projects sent our way via the tip line. Well, mainly it seems like we get spam, but the emails that aren’t trying to sell us something are invariably awesome. Even so, it’s not often we get a tip that contains the magic phrase “determine Mach number” in its list of features. So to say we were interested in the Asgard Air Data Computer (ADC) is something of an understatement.

Now we’ll admit right up front: we aren’t 100% sure who the target audience for the Asgard is, but it certainly looks impressive. Team member …read more

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Wrecked Civic Rides Again as Cozy Camp Trailer

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It may not be the typical fare that we like to feature, but you can’t say this one isn’t a hack. It’s a camp trailer fashioned from the back half of a wrecked Honda Civic, and it’s a pretty unique project.

We don’t know about other parts of the world, but a common “rural American engineering” project is to turn the bed and rear axle of an old pickup truck into a trailer. [monickingbird]’s hacked Civic is similar to these builds, but with much more refinement. Taking advantage of the intact and already appointed passenger compartment of a 1997 Civic …read more

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3D Printed Hovercraft Takes Flight

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Last time we checked in on [Ivan Miranda] he was putting a drill press on the Internet. Lately, he has been trying to 3D print a hovercraft with some success. He made four attempts before arriving at one that works fairly well, as you can see in the video below. We will warn you, though, the screwdriver cam is a bit disconcerting and we suggest waiting at least an hour after you eat to watch.

The starboard impeller broke midway through the test, although with a single impeller it was working pretty well. [Ivan] thinks he can print the impeller …read more

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Fail of the Week: Engine Flips Out

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A few weeks ago an incredible video of an engine exploding started making the rounds on Facebook. This particular engine was thankfully in a dyno room, rather than sitting a couple of feet away from a driver on a track. We’ve all seen engine carnage videos before, but this one stands out. This diesel engine literally rips itself apart, with the top half of the engine flipping and landing on one side of the room while the bottom half sits still spinning on the dyno frame.

Building performance engines is part science, part engineering, and part hacking. While F1 racing …read more

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Finding Your Motorbike Using Wi-Fi

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An urban planner once told me that every car requires at least four times as much space as they actually occupy. Each needs a spot on the roads, and three available parking spaces: one at home, one at work, and one to shop. Motorcycles are much smaller, but they still spend most of their time parked.

Motorcycles are the primary means of transport in Southeast Asia, and learning to safely drive one is an essential part of adapting to life here. Assuming it’s not pouring rain and you’re not flooded past your ankles, it’s actually quite a pleasant experience… until …read more

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Interfacing with a Digital Speedometer

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After swapping the engine out in his scooter, [James Stanley] made an unfortunate discovery. The speedometer was digitally controlled, and while the original engine had a sensor which would generate pulses for it to interpret, his new engine didn’t. Learning that the original sensor would pull the signal wire to ground each time it detected a tooth of one of the spinning gears, [James] reasoned he needed to find a way to detect the scooter’s speed and create these pulses manually.

To find the scooter’s speed, he installed a magnet on the front wheel and a hall effect sensor on …read more

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How Much Of A Battery Pack Does Your Electric Car Need?

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[Elon Musk] recently staged one of his characteristic high-profile product launches, at which he unveiled a new Tesla electric semi-truck. It was long on promise and short on battery pack weight figures, so of course [Real Engineering] smelled a rat. His video investigating the issue is below the break, but it’s not the link that caught our eye for this article. As part of the investigation he also created an online calculator to estimate the battery size required for a given performance on any electric vehicle.

It’s not perfectly intuitive, for example it uses SI units rather than real-world ones …read more

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Camping In A…. Corolla?

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A weekend away camping in the wilds can do wonders for one’s sanity, and the joy of spending it in a recently converted camping vehicle adds to the delight. In a twist on the conventional camper, redditor [Gongfucius] and his wife have converted their 2005 Toyota Corolla into the perfect getaway vehicle for two.

To make enough room, the rear seating had to go, and removing it was deceptively easy. [Gongfucius] was able to build and fit a platform peppered with storage hatches that could snap into place and cover the trunk and backseat — covering it with felt for …read more

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Boxes, Form An Orderly Queue Behind The Armchair!

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If you have ever been to a hacker camp, you’ll know the problem of transporting all your stuff to your hackerspace village, or to wherever you’ll be basing yourself for the duration. The car park is always too far away, whatever trolley you’ve brought along is never big enough, and the terrain you have to drag everything over feels more like the Chilkoot Trail than a city sidewalk.

[Jan Henrik] and [Niklas Fauth] have an effective solution to all your hacker camp transport woes, in the form of a motorized platform designed to carry a storage box. Underneath the platform …read more

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