Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss a great week of hardware hacks. Two delightful mechanical hacks focus on bicycles: one that puts a differential on the front fork, and the other a flywheel between the knees. Elliot was finally impressed by something involving AI — a machine-learning guitar pedal. You’ve heard of a delta bot? The tripteron is similar but with a single rail for the three arms. After a look at flip dots, tiny robots, and solar air planes we close the show geeking out about racing electric vehicles up a hill and stories of the hardware that has made closed captions possible.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
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Episode 121 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
Tell us your answer for this week’s “What’s that sound?”. Next week on the show we’ll randomly draw one name from the correct answers to win a limited-edition Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. (How limited? So far, limited to three. But I’m sure we’ll make another in a couple weeks.)
New This Week:
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- 3D Printed Flip Dots
- Trippy Tripteron Kinematics Brainteaser
- Tiny PCB Motor Robot Is Making Its First Wobbly Moves
- Neural Networks Emulate Any Guitar Pedal For $120
- Crazy Bikes:
- Solar Plane Is Like One Big Flying Solar Panel
Quick Hacks:
- Mike’s Picks
- Elliot’s Picks:
You got the hillclimb problem slightly wrong: electric cars are generally limited in their power to weight ratio and actually lose in that regard to ICE vehicles – where they gain is putting that power down across the whole power band. Plus, you can use batteries which have high power to weight ratio, that you could never put in a production car, because they are essentially the equivalent of running on raw nitromethane.
I’m not sure. Convince me that 4x beefy electric wheel motors weighs more than an IC Engine and the requisite transmission. That’s the fixed weight difference.
The rest is variable, and while batteries have a lower energy/weight density than fuel, electric should win on short races.
Power to weight of electric _is definitely_ lower when you want to be able to drive 300 km, like in real life.
But yeah. Totally spitballing. I’d love to see the real numbers on the Pikes cars.
Have you seen the off road EV from the King of the Hammers race?
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/electric-toyota-4runner-king-of-the-hammers/