Roll A Black Box For Your Wheels

Telemetric devices for vehicles, better known as black boxes, cracked the consumer scene 25 years ago with the premiere of OnStar. These days, you can get one for free from your insurance company if you want to try your luck at the discounts for safe driving game. But what if you wanted a black box just to mess around with that doesn’t share your driving data with the world? Just make one.

[TheForeignMan]’s DIY telematics box was designed to pull reports of the car’s RPM, speed, and throttle depression angle through the ODBII port. An ODBII-to-Bluetooth module sends the data …read more

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3D Printed Tank has Slick Tread Design

Tank projects are great because while every tank design is the same in a fundamental way, there’s nevertheless endless variety in the execution and results. [Hoo Jian Li]’s 3D Printed Tank is smartly laid out and has an unusual tank tread that shows off some slick curves.

The tank itself is remotely controlled over Bluetooth with a custom controller that uses the common HC-05 Bluetooth radio units. The treads are driven by four hobby gearmotors with custom designed wheels, and run over an idler wheel in the center of the body. There isn’t any method of taking up slack in …read more

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Don’t Flake on Your Fish—Feed them Automatically

We get it. You love your fish, but they can’t bark or gently nip at your shin flesh to let you know they’re hungry. (And they always kind of look hungry, don’t they?) One day bleeds into the next, and you find yourself wondering if you’ve fed them yet today. Or are you thinking of yesterday? Fish deserve better than that. Why not build them a smart fish feeder?

Domovoy is a completely open-source automatic fish feeder that lets you feed them on a schedule, over Bluetooth, or manually. This simple yet elegant design uses a small stepper motor to …read more

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Grawler: Painless Cleaning For Glass Roofs

Part of [Gelstronic]’s house has a glass roof. While he enjoys the natural light and warmth, he doesn’t like getting up on a ladder to clean it every time a bird makes a deposit or the rainwater stains build up. He’s tried to make a cleaning robot in the past, but the 25% slope of the roof complicates things a bit. Now, with the addition of stepper motors and grippy tank treads, [Gelstronic] can tell this version of GRawler exactly how far to go, or to stay in one place to clean a spot that’s extra dirty.

GRawler is designed …read more

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