Hack a Day » electric vehicle

Converting a Miata to all-electric

Mike Szczys — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:32:57 +0000

[Henry Herndon] converted a Mazda Miata to an all-electric vehicle. There’s a ton of great information in his archives, as well as a round-up video that we’ve embedded after the break. It’s interesting to see him implement two different types of Nalgene bottles as coolant reservoirs. The polycarbonate on the first shattered on him but the soft plastic replacement seems to have done the trick. The batteries add a lot of weight to the vehicle and he ends up refitting the suspension to compensate. [Henry] registered the vehicle with the state and now has a street legal EV of his own design.

Also worth a look is his post covering the 2009 Wayland Invitational. There as a large collection of electric vehicle conversions at the get together.

[Thanks Anthony]

Filed under: green hacks, transportation hacks

Electric VW mobile photobooth

Eliot — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:30:28 +0000

[Soren Coughlin-Glaser] runs a mobile photobooth in the Portland area. It’s built inside of an electric Volkswagen bus. The conversion to electric hasn’t been easy though. He’s spent most of the last few months rebuilding it after an electrical fire. Last fall he installed a 9 inch electric motor from Hi-Torque Electric after his smaller one blew up. We really like this project and look forward to seeing it back on the road… once he replaces his stripped transmission coupler.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Posted in digital cameras hacks, transportation hacks

XBox 360 Hacking 101 extra

Will O'Brien — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 04:58:00 +0000

[BlueMoon] let me know about a translation of an interview posted over at xbox-scene. The original dutch version is here. It’s a very good overview of XBox 360 security and the exploits needed to take advantage of the hardware.

If you dig EVs, you might want to check out my latest experiment. I’ll be building a EV, but each step of the process will be defined by reader votes. It’s $1/vote, with the idea that the votes will pay for the project.
[Jay] sent in a little info on streaming audio and sometimes video to your Wii.

[Robert] sent in his research on building and testing diy GSM antennas for extending ~~rage~~ range.

Siamese electric motors

Will O'Brien — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:53:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post something about these for a while. Jim builds motors for EV hobbiests on the side – one of his cooler creations is the siamese electric motor. Some others have used belt drives to combine motors, but Jim actually builds the motors into a single unit. He built this set of 8 inch twins for the White Zombie drag racer.

I pumped Jim for more details, but he’s not done tweaking his next set of siamese motors. So, why is this even a hack? It’s a nice piece of machine work, but it gets interesting if you consider some stock specs. Most EV cars get 9″ motors – these are rated at 19hp or so. They take some monster hardware just to drive – high amperage, high voltage. Running a pair of 8hp motors can produce similar power with significant cost savings – everything gets cheaper. To generalize, you need a $1500 motor and $1000 controller just to get in the game. Not to mention that rebuildable forklift motors can be had for a song.