It’s A Plane… It’s A Train… Um… It’s Both?

September 1, 2022 by Al Williams 100 Comments

What kind of electric vehicle travels at 620 miles per hour (998 km/h)? According to Canadian and French company TransPot, their FluxJet will do it and they want to use it to virtually shrink the Great White North. An electric jet? Not exactly. The FluxJet is a magnetic levitation (maglev) train riding in a vacuum tube with contactless power delivery.

The company claims it can carry 54 passengers or 10 tons of cargo. You can see two videos about the concept below. Judging by the second video, the device might be controlled by a serial port — well, probably not, but we were still amused to see the directory of tty devices on the screen.

Pipe dream (no pun intended)? Maybe. But they did get $550 million in funding and a plan to build a line between Calgary and Edmonton that will take 45 minutes to traverse. Reports are that they did demonstrate a 1-ton 18-foot-long prototype, although we couldn’t find any actual video footage of that — just hints of it in the marketing videos.

Of course, this isn’t the first such system proposed as a “hyperloop” but they do seem to be building momentum financially. We aren’t clear what they are talking about with the “veillance flux,” but we also know that since they are a French-speaking organization, it may just be another way to say “sensors” because — we think — veillance is a French word that means watching. We also aren’t sure how a train in a vacuum has much in common with an airplane. Maglev isn’t new, either.

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Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements

September 1, 2022 by Dan Maloney 41 Comments

Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny objects has led to technological leaps that weren’t possible before they came along, like the vibration motors in cell phones, or the tiny speakers in earbuds and hearing aids. And that’s not to mention the motors in electric vehicles and the generators in wind turbines, along with countless medical, military, and scientific uses.

These advances come at a cost, though, as the rare earth elements needed to make them are getting harder to come by. It’s not that rare earth elements like neodymium are all that rare geologically; rather, deposits are unevenly distributed, making it easy for the metals to become pawns in a neverending geopolitical chess game. What’s more, extracting them from their ores is a tricky business in an era of increased sensitivity to environmental considerations.

Luckily, there’s more than one way to make a magnet, and it may soon be possible to build permanent magnets as strong as neodymium magnets, but without any rare earth metals. In fact, the only thing needed to make them is iron and nitrogen, plus an understanding of crystal structure and some engineering ingenuity.

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Custom Calculator Brings Us Back To The 70s

September 1, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

There are certain design aesthetics from every era that manage to survive the fads of their time and live throughout history. Ancient Greek architecture is still drawn upon for design inspiration in modern buildings, the mid-century modern style from the 60s still inspires various designs of consumer goods, and the rounded, clean looking cars from the 90s are still highly desirable qualities in automotive design. For electronics, though, we like this 70s-inspired calculator that [Aaron] recently built.

The calculator hearkens back to the days of calculators like the HP-29C with its large buttons and dot-matrix display. [Aaron] built the case out of various woods with a screen angled towards the user, and it uses a LCD display similar to those found in antique calculators. The brain of the calculator is an Arduino which fits easily into the case, and [Aaron] also built the keyboard from scratch with Cherry MX-style mechanical keys soldered together into a custom shape.

The software to run the calculator is fairly straightforward, but we are most impressed with the woodworking, styling, and keyboard design in this build. [Aaron] is also still ironing out some bugs with the power supply as it uses a DC-DC converter to power the device from a single lithium battery. For those who are more fond of early 2000s graphing calculators instead, be sure to take a look at this graphing calculator arcade cabinet.

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Rolling Sphere Robotic Arm Seems Serpentine

September 1, 2022 by Danie Conradie 9 Comments

Hinge joints are usually the simplest to use for robotic applications, but if you want motion that looks more organic, rolling joint (or rolling contact) mechanisms are worth a look. [Skyentific] is experimenting with this mechanism and built a 6-degree-of-freedom robotic arm with it.

The mechanism doesn’t necessarily need the physical surfaces to roll across each other to work, and you can get to two degrees of freedom with the virtual rolling sphere mechanism. [Skyentific] demonstrates how these work with both cardboard cutouts and 3D printed models. Stacking three of these mechanisms on top of each other, with each stage driven by three Dynamixel servos, the motion seems almost serpentine.

Since the servos are driving the small bottom linkages of each stage, they are operating at a significant mechanical disadvantage. The arm can just barely keep itself upright on top of the table, so [Skyentific] mounted it upside down to the bottom of the table to reduce the load of its weight. With the front stage removed, the load is significantly reduced, and it doesn’t struggle as much.

An interesting advantage of this mechanism is that there is always a straight path down the center for cabling. The length of this line between the two plates remains the same throughout the entire range of motion, so it can also be used to route a rigid drive shaft. This is actually what was done on the LIMS2-AMBIDEX robot to rotate its hand, and is also where saw this mechanism for the first time. Interestingly, that implementation didn’t drive the linkages themselves, but used tension cables around the mechanism. We also see this in a very similar tentacle robot, so it might be a better option.

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Converting An Old ATV To Electric Drive

August 31, 2022 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

[RCLifeOn] happened upon an old petrol-powered ATV that had seen better days. He decided it was the perfect candidate for a conversion to electric drive.

First up, the chassis was stripped back and cleaned, before being given a fresh coat of paint. It then got fresh valve stems for the tires and was ready for its drivetrain conversion.

The motor of choice is a brushless type, rated for 42 kW at 120 V. [RCLifeOn] doesn’t have batteries capable of maxing out those specs, yet, but carried on with the build. The motor was mounted on the chassis, and a 3D printed hub was installed to get the sprocket on the end of the motor.

A stress test uphill killed the speed controller. This was not unexpected, as it was a cheap unit severely undersized for the application.

The first drive was rough and ready, as the speed controller wasn’t sensored, the gearing wasn’t quite right, and the chain wasn’t very tight. However, it did successfully make it around the grass, slowly. Further improvements then included a water cooling circuit for the speed controller and the addition of a battery compartment. That wasn’t enough to stop the speed controller bursting into flames during a difficult uphill climb, though.

Fundamentally, though, the project shows promise. Bigger batteries, a sensored speed controller, and appropriate gearing should make it a quick beast. 42 kW of power is a good amount for a light ATV, plus there’s the benefit of instant-on torque from an electric motor.

We’ve seen [RCLifeOn] tackle some high-powered electric builds before, like his impressive powered surfboard. With the right parts, we’re sure he’ll have this thing ripping about at pace before long!

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Solar Cells As Art Form

August 31, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

When most of us approach a project, we have a certain problem to solve. 3D printing, microcontrollers, batteries, and all kinds of technologies are usually tools to accomplish some task. This is not necessarily true in the art world, though, where the intrinsic nature of these tools can be explored for their own sake rather than as a means to an end. The latest one that came across our desk is this light-powered sound generator.

The art piece looks a bit like a mobile with rotating arms, holding various small solar cells each connected to a speaker. As the arms pivot, the light falling on the cells changes which drives a specially-designed circuit connected to a speaker. The circuit acts as an oscillator, passing the changing voltage from the cell through various capacitors and transistors to produce changing tones in the speaker.

The effect of the rotating solar panels is not only oscillations from the speakers as the light changes, but oscillations in the sound of the speakers as they rotate towards and away from the observer. It’s a unique project and perfect for the art show it was in. It’s also not the only sound-focused art installation we’ve ever seen before, be sure to check out this one based on an ESP32.

The Cheat Way To Perfectly Split An Oreo

August 31, 2022 by Lewin Day 28 Comments

Believe it or not, much research has been done in how to perfectly split Oreos with an even amount of cream on both sides. Early studies suggested it simply wasn’t possible, with one side always getting the majority of the cream. However, [Ian Charnas] has now found a sneaky workaround.

First attempts involved heating in a microwave or chilling the cookies in the freezer. Neither helped in the slightest. A vacuum chamber only served to delaminate the cream from both sides of the cookie entirely, while water jet cutting made an awful mess.

[Ian] ended up realizing that crack propagation could be used to prepare Oreos for a perfect split. A knife was used to score a groove all around the cream layer, right down the middle. The Oreos were then frozen, turning the cream effectively solid. When the Oreo is then twisted, the groove serves as a starting point for a crack that propagates across the surface, splitting the cream neatly between both halves.

[Ian] took things further by building a 3D-printed lathe that grooves Oreos using a sterilized scalpel blade. This allows cookies to be quickly prepped for a perfect split. However, you are left eating frozen Oreos at the end of it, with some sacrifices to freshness.

It’s a neat way to approach the Oreo splitting problem, even if it’s only one step removed from simply using a knife. We’ve seen [Ian]’s work before, too, in the form of the radioactively-powered Game Boy. Video after the break.

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