Electric “Microkart” Has Tons Of Kick

July 25, 2014 by James Hobson 14 Comments

Go Kart with Independent Suspension

When you’re building an electric go kart, you really have two options. Convert a normal gasoline powered one by swapping out the power plant… Or build it from scratch! [Ganharr] opted for the for the latter to save some money, and to design it just the way he wanted.

Now you may have noticed it looks a bit small — because it is. It’s really more of a Micro-Kart, but that’s okay because [Ganharr] is winning a father-of-the-year award for building it for his kid!

It features two 2kW (~3HP) brushless electric motors, which independently drive the rear wheels. These are powered by two 48V 50A continuous (100A peak) speed controllers.[Ganharr] also spared no expense on the batteries, opting for a 48V lithium-ion pack composed of Headway cells (3.2V 15aH capacity each, 40152 type). Continue reading “Electric “Microkart” Has Tons Of Kick” →

Custom CAN System Logs Motorcyle Data Like Magic

July 24, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 10 Comments

RW-2x_on_stand_at_TRC

A student team at Ohio State University has designed and built a custom Controller Area Network (CAN) data acquisition system complete with a sensor interface, rider display, and a Linux-based data logger for a RW-2x motorcyle.

They call their small, convenient micro-controller circuit board the Magic CAN Node, and it measures automotive sensors throughout the electric vehicle. This includes a variety of thermistor resistors to check changes in temperature. A few 0-5V and 0-12V sensors to monitor brake pressure transducers along with some differential air pressure sensors can be added too. Since the vehicle is basically a “rolling electromagnetic noise bomb”, they wanted to keep all of these analog sensors as close to the source as possible.

The Magic CAN Node is based on a Texas Instruments microcontroller called the TMS320F28035. This keeps the energy consumption at a low level.

For message handling, the team, led by [Aaron], tapped into the built-in CAN module within the F28035. All of the CAN plugs have two of the pins shorted to GND or +12V, so when there’s only one plug connected, the analog switch IC will connect a 120 ohm resistor across the CAN lines.

Continue reading “Custom CAN System Logs Motorcyle Data Like Magic” →

A Better, Cheaper Smartphone Thermal Imager

July 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

thermal

For the last few years, the prices of infrared thermal imaging devices have fallen through the floor, down from tens of thousands of dollars a decade ago, to just about a grand for a very high-resolution device. This dramatic drop in price was brought about by new sensors, and at the very low-end, there are quite a few very inexpensive low resolution thermal imaging devices.

The goal now, it seems, is to figure out some way to add these infrared devices to a smartphone or tablet. There have been similar projects and Kickstarters before, but [Marius]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize is undercutting all of them, and doing it in a way that’s far, far too clever.

Previous ‘thermal imagers on a smartphone’ projects include the Mu Thermal Camera, a $300 Kickstarter reward that turned out to be vaporware. The IR-Blue is yet another Kickstarter we’ve seen, and something that’s actually shipping for about $200. [Marius] expects his thermal imager to cost just $99. He’s getting away with this pricing with a little bit of crazy electronics, and actually designing a minimum viable product.

Both the Mu Thermal Camera and the IR-Blue communicate with their smartphone host via Bluetooth. [Marius] felt radio modules were unnecessary and inspired by the HiJack system where low-power sensors are powered and read through a headphone jack, realized he could do better.

Always the innovator, [Marius] realized he could improve upon the HiJack power harvesting solution, and got everything working with a prototype. The actual hardware in the sensor is based on an engineering sample of the Omron D6T-1616L IR array module, a 16×16 array of IR pixels displaying thermal data on a portable device at 4 FPS.

It’s interesting, for sure, and half the price and quadruple the resolution of the IR-Blue. Even if [Marius] doesn’t win The Hackaday Prize, he’s at least got a winning Kickstarter on his hands. Video of the 8×8 pixel prototype below.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

Continue reading “A Better, Cheaper Smartphone Thermal Imager” →

A New Approach To Robotic Walking Looks More Like Kinetic Art

July 24, 2014 by James Hobson 22 Comments

Flipping Robot

Here’s a really cool application of 3D printing and robotics by a fellow named [Maundy] – He’s created a very unique kinetic robot which relies on gravity to walk around.

All the electronics are housed in the cylinder as shown above. It can roll freely back and forth by some kind of mechanism inside (not shown), but the beauty of it is, when the cylinder rolls to one end, gravity takes over and the little robot actually flips through the air, reorienting itself onto its other feet.

Due to the flipping nature of the bot, it can even climb over small obstacles with ease – but this one can’t steer, so there’s no threat of them taking over the world. Perhaps with a modification to the control cylinder (turn it into a ball), the robot could orientate itself vertically, and then kind of spin in place in order to steer…

Anyway, you have to see it to believe it, so stick around after the break to see it in action!

Continue reading “A New Approach To Robotic Walking Looks More Like Kinetic Art” →

Cosmonaut Or Taikonot: Vote For The Most Outrageous Component

July 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

We have a new round of Astronaut or Astronot, the little community voting thing we’re doing for The Hackaday Prize. Why should you care? Because tomorrow (Friday, 10:00 AM Eastern) we’re doing a voters lottery. We’re selecting a random person on hackaday.io, and if that person has voted, they win a pretty awesome bench power supply.

Why are we telling you this now? Because voting in previous rounds doesn’t count for this round. If you want to nab a power supply, you need to vote. We previously gave away an awesome scope, and a very cool 3D printer to a random person on hackaday.io. Judging from previous rounds, I’d guess the odds of us giving away the supply this week are pretty good, but I’m not doing those maths right now. I’ll post a video of the drawing tomorrow around 10:30 Eastern.

Adding GPIOs To The Raspberry Pi With The Camera Interface

July 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

GPIOs

The Raspberry Pi Model B+ was just released, and now everyone who picks one of those up has a few more GPIO pins to play around with. For the millions of people with the two-year-old version of the Pi, we’re still stuck with the same old, same old: 17 GPIOs on the big header, and that’s about it as far as toggling pins goes.

The Broadcom SoC on the Pi has far more GPIO pins than are broken out on the large header, and a few of those go to the CSI camera interface. These GPIOs can be broken out with a few flat cables (Portuguese, Google Translatrix), giving you four more GPIOs, and this technique can also be used with the new, expanded Model B+.

The CSI camera connector has two I²C lines that go directly to the camera, controllable in Linux as GPIO0 and GPIO1. There are two more GPIO connectors on the CSI connector controllable as GPIO5 and GPIO21. By carefully slicing and soldering wires to a flat cable, these GPIO lines can be broken out onto a breadboard.

There’s a video below demonstrating these GPIO lines being used to control a few LEDs. Of course, anything that is possible with a normal Raspi GPIO is possible with the CSI connector GPIO lines.

Continue reading “Adding GPIOs To The Raspberry Pi With The Camera Interface” →

THP Hacker Bio: Kenji Larsen

July 24, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

thp-hacker-bio-kenji-larsen

I met up with [Kenji Larsen] at HOPE X last weekend, and I’m fairly certain he was the coolest person at a conference full of really cool people. Talking to him for a little bit, you get a sense of what it would be like to speak with [Buckmister Fuller], [Tesla], or any of the other ‘underappreciated, but not by people in the know’ minds scattered about history. I’ll just let his answers to our hacker bio questions demonstrate that.

7033431402348237268 [Kenji]’s project for The Hackaday Prize is the Reactron Overdrive. It’s not just one board he’s building here, but an entire suite of sensors, interfaces, and nodes that form a complete human to machines – note the plural ‘machines’ – interface. When you consider that no one knows what the Internet of Things actually is, and that [Kenji] is working on IoT 3.0, you get a sense that there’s really something here. Also, his project log has a Tron Recognizer in it. That has to count for something, right?