Creative Vandalism The KITT Way

January 28, 2023 by Jenny List 14 Comments

It’s probable that most of us have at some time dreamed up a witty and subversive way to deface our city, but that few of us will have followed through on the idea. [Matt Gray] then is something of a modern-day urban hero for doing just that. Who couldn’t walk past Knightrider Court, EC4, in the City of London, without thinking of the 1980s TV series featuring David Hasselhoff and a talking car? [Matt] couldn’t, and so of course he simply had to upgrade the street sign with the signature LED scanner.

At its heart is an Adafruit Gemma ATtiny85 board in a 3D-printed case attached to a length of aluminium extrusion holding a strip of addressable LEDs. When attached to the sign it looks the business, and while the late-night crowd showed it little interest the Londoners passing in the morning were much more enthusiastic. We applaud him for the idea.

As occasional students of medieval history here at Hackaday, of course we couldn’t let this go without asking where the unexpected London street name came from. Sadly for fans of the Hoff it has nothing to do with the small screen, instead it appears to have a much earlier origin having been first recorded in 1322. The knightriders in question are reputed to have been real medieval knights, or at least horsemen. Pay it a visit, should you ever find yourself in the British capital.

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Knight Rider Keeps On Truckin’

August 21, 2022 by Adam Fabio 39 Comments

[AJ] and [Joe], collectively the [Knight Rider Historians] are bringing back one of the most iconic vehicles of the 1980’s. Everyone remembers KITT driving into the F.L.A.G. truck. Even the Mythbusters re-enacted the stunt back in 2007. The duo managed to track down the original tractor and trailer from the show for restoration, and part of that process means uncovering the Hollywood hacks used to make the car-driving-into-trailer stunt work.

Back in the ’80s when a movie or TV show wrapped up, the props were often re-used in other productions or sold off. The 1975 Dorsey trailer used on Knight Rider was eventually purchased, stripped down, and painted white. It spent the last 30 years serving as a racing trailer. Carrying cars, and tools, and serving as a mobile shop at the track.

Unsurprisingly, most of the custom parts from Knight Rider are gone – but some hints remain. Specifically, [KRH] are trying to figure out how the drive-up door operated. Originally they assumed it was a hydraulic ram system that pulled the cables. However, above a dropped ceiling they found a welded hard mount and a 24-foot rail running down the trailer roof.

They believe the hard mount was for a winch, and the rail was used as a cable guide for two winch cables. A set of pulleys just behind the door directed these cables down to the ramp itself.

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Larson Scanner Using 7400 Series Logic Hardware

April 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[RandomTask] is sharing a Larson scanner he built a few decades ago. These days you can whip one of these up using an Arduino in under an hour. He mentions this, but we agree that for nostalgic purposes there’s nothing like implementing the scanning LED effect using hardware.

Often called a Cylon Eye (after the television show Battlestar Gallactica) or referred to as the lights on the front of Kitt (the car from Knight Rider), the effect doesn’t just involve switching LEDs on and off in the proper order. A true Larson Scanner fades the LEDs as the bright point moves away from them, resulting in a tail that dims over time.

This implementation uses a 555 timer as the clock signal, allowing for speed control through a potentiometer. A counter chip, J-K flipflop, and line decoder all work with each other to address the movement of the brightest light. The fading effect is managed via a capacitor and resistor for each LED. The video after the break shows the pleasing result of this setup.

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Model Car Additions Make Us Hear Knight Rider Theme

February 12, 2011 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This collection of model vehicle hacks adds obstacle avoidance in an attempt to make them autonomous. At the front end you’ll find two PCBs which use IR approximation to monitor the road ahead. We’re not familiar with this particular use of these IR receivers (TSOP1738) which we’re used to seeing in remote control receiver applications but if recent posts are any indication we think you’ll enjoy the use of a 555 timer on each of those boards.

The rest of the hardware is pretty common, a PIC 16F628 does the thinking while an L293D h-bridge drives the motors. Alas, we didn’t find a video, or even a description of the finished project. But there are full schematics, board layout pictures, and the code for both this vehicle and a second Tank version.

[Thanks Pieter]

Digidash: Digital Dashboard For Megasquirt

May 31, 2008 by Will O'Brien 5 Comments

The Digidash project is an open source digital dashboard designed just for the megasquirt EFI system we mentioned in our diy EFI motorcycle post. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t link the hardware design. From the description, I’m assuming that it’s essentially a graphic LCD driven by an Atmel microcontroller that talks to the Megasquirt to get the display info.