Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Tom Nardi go over the best stories and hacks from the previous week, covering everything from sidestepping rockets to homebrew OLED displays. We’ll cover an incredible attempt to really emulate the Nintendo Game Boy, low-cost injection molding of rubbery parts, a tube full of hypersonic shockwaves, and how a hacked depth finder and a rowboat can help chart those local rivers and lakes that usually don’t get any bathymetric love. Plus, even though he’s on vacation this week, Elliot has left us with a ruddy mysterious song to try and identify.
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!
Direct download (52 MB)
Episode 135 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 rare Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
New This Week:
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- GateBoy Is A Game Boy Emulated At Gate Level
- Injection Molding Silicone Parts For Under $50
- Making OLED Displays In The Home Lab
- Homebrew Sounder Maps The Depths In Depth
- Motorcycle Simulation Rig Is Off To The Races
- Three-Stage Thrust Vectoring Model Rocket With Tiny Flight Computers
Quick Hacks:
- Mike’s Picks
- Tom’s Picks:
Mike you were on the right track! Think of it as steering the bike out from under itself. You turn the handlebars right, which makes the bike turn right and lean left. Then the handlebars are slightly turned inward (left).
The crazy thing is, you are always doing this on a bicycle. It’s so intuitive that you may not even notice it. Try it on a bike, I promise it will work no matter how fast you are going
A good explanation, thanks! I figured bicycle has to be the same phenomenon, but learning to ride a bike is in such a distant past that it’s all muscle memory and no theory at this point.
So do motorcyclists have to think about it, or is that all intuition as well?
minutephisics has nice short video explanation as always :)
https://youtu.be/llRkf1fnNDM
Thanks for crediting FurrTek for the schematics used in GateBoy!
-Austin, GateBoy author.
It was such a delight to dig through both of those projects. You’ve pulled off a great hack and I’m really happy you brought us all along for the ride!
I rode both bicycles and motorcycles and you absolutely don’t turn the handlebar the opposite way of where you are turning. Maybe I have been doing this subconsciously, as Opossumax mentioned, but you definitely don’t have to think “Oh I am going over 50mph the controls are different now”.
I think it is a little bit misleading to say on a bicycle/motorcycle you turn left to go right. When I heard that I imagined the driver actively holding their handlebar the opposite way throughout the curve (same way how you hold your steering wheel in a car). Instead it is just a little jiggle that helps you lean into the curve easier (faster).
I think opossumax explained it right. And the best thing is that you don’t think about this.
Motorcycle steering in progress… don’t look directly at it or you’ll have a bad time :-D
Now that you describe it, the fundamental difference between bicycle and motorcycle is mass, it I’m oblivious despite having put thousands of miles on the bicycle, but experienced motorcycle riders know because it makes you work with the machine instead of against it.
This is exactly true. It’s called “countersteering” and a failure to learn and practice it has caused more than one panicked motorcyclist to turn directly into the oncoming traffic that they were trying to avoid.
If you don’t ride, you see motorcycle racers leaning over in turns, and you think that their weight is pulling the bike over? If you do ride, you know that you’re controlling the angle with steer/countersteer, and hanging off is just an extra trick to get the COG lower.
It also turns out you do this with bicycles, you just don’t notice. Try applying opposite-side pressure on the handlebars next time you’re out. You’ll get it.
Try this for thinking about it: you don’t *turn* the bars; you apply *torque* one way or the other to *change* the radius of arc the bike is following. Infinite radius=straight. So: relax to go straight, a *little* pressure on one grip or the other to *initiate* a turn, *relax* thru the turn, a little pressure on the other grip to stand the bike back up again. It’s really marvelously *easy* and your brain is already wired for it.
The steering angle geometrically *follows* lean angle (simplified). But you don’t really have much awareness of the angle because you’re not looking at it or trying to force it to any particular angle.
But really it all starts with *look* where you want to go. First turn your head and look. Then, if you’re thinking about it — because just learning, not thinking about anything else, whatever — press the inside grip a little (just modulating *pressure*, not *push*ing) to perturb the balance from going straight. The magic part is that if you can stand up your brain is already wired to stop pressing into the turn once your turning, and to stand up again once your body gets lined up with your eyeballs.
The bike is a machine that plugs into your brain to keep your body lined up with your head. Once familiar, you don’t really do any of this, you just look where you want to go. The hard part is training your eyes to look past the scary thing you don’t want to hit. Seriously.
Says some guy on Teh Interweb.
“The steering angle geometrically *follows* lean angle” … Ok, I’m going to get flak for that.
Yes, countersteering initiates lean.
I was trying to say something like:
+ countersteer works both ways to *change* lean
+ countersteer is a perturbation from the current equilibrium steering angle, which is really kind of private data to the bike and, to a first approximation, is a function of lean angle, which really doesn’t matter because the bike not the rider controls the steering angle and doesn’t have to tell anyone what it’s doing. Is why relax not tense arms.