I’m getting pretty interested in building an electric motorcycle, and I ran across this little hack to charge multiple batteries with one charger. It uses a 4020 counter that’s pulsed by my dear friend the 555 to activate a series of relay pairs to switch a single charger sequentially between battery cells. A more advanced version could use a microcontroller to monitor the state of each cell to ensure even charging. If you’re thinking of constructing an uber-ups, this could be useful.
Month: October 2006
WiCrawl – Next-gen WiFi Auditor
At ToorCon, our friends at Midnight Research Labs released a new automated WiFi auditing tool called WiCrawl. WiCrawl automatically scans for accesspoints. Once an AP is discovered a number of plugins can be run against it ranging from getting an IP to breaking encryption. Aaron Peterson’s talk and demo is 50mins. You can download the 640×480 170MB .mov version here. The tool is going to be included in the next BackTrack CD.
USB Port Phone Hack
This one is more case mod than real hack – [computerguru365] whacked a female mini-b USB port into his Samsung [thx rsilvawashington] to avoid buying the overpriced Nokia cable(Reminds me of the infamous $65 startac serial cable) I like it, internal cell phone hardware hacks don’t come along very often, and he found a use for one of those useless demo phones.
Removable Laptop Water Cooling
[Bard] just sent me a nice water cooling hack. He built a simple water cooling system that can be manually inserted into the cooling system of his laptop. He wanted it for watching movies sans annoying fan noise. He soldered the parts together using a stove instead of the standard propane torch. Necessity is definitely the mother of invention. I hope he relocates the water cooling supply. When he wants to go mobile, he just unplugs the cooling fins.
Hack Day Winners
Yahoo recently held *Ahem* Hack Day developers conference/workshop. The winner’s pictured – a ‘blogging purse’. It looks like it just uploads images. The details are a bit on the weak side, but some of the stuff looks neat. The purse contains a camera, basic stamp, pedometer and Nokia phone.
The YBox is some sort of network to TV gateway (Microcontroller, Ethernet, IR reciever, RF out in an altoids tin). Looks like it pulls data from yahoo channels, but supposedly it’s configurable for custom data.
Speaking of contests, [David] pointed out this ARM design contest – entering will garner you a free dev kit.
Electric Motorcycle
Lets face it, riding a segway or any other electric scooter just doesn’t get quite the respect that we’d wish. Eliot pointed out this video of an excellent electric motorcycle conversion in action. It’s a such a clean looking conversion that I couldn’t resist posting it. The major components to do the conversion were six SLA batteries with a DC converter that acts as a speed controller. I think it sounds like a giant R/C car rolling down the road.
I’ve been meaning to build an electric bike myself. I think there’s a huge potiention for EV home builders and bikes. The component cost is significantly less for a bike, and it’s just ideal for one-off development. Perhaps the day of the dorky EV is ending? [via kneeslider]
[Update: Calling this a motorcycle is a bit generous. Since it’s a 50cc chassis originally, it’s technically a converted moped. Still, I wanna see Woz charge one of these with his segway…]
Russian VFD
Nixie clocks seem to be a right of passage. [jkx] sent us something a little different. I’m diggin this one because the russian tube is pretty esoteric. He’s got a few nice looking projects up. (His tube amp is a beauty.) And yeah, there’s a video.
