Day: September 18, 2023

A silver front loader cargo bike sits in a parking lot in front of an electric vehicle charger. A cable runs from the charger to the bike.

Fast Charging A Cargo Bike From An Electric Car Charger

September 18, 2023 by 15 Comments

Fast charging is all the rage with new electric cars touting faster and faster times to full, but other EVs like ebikes and scooters are often left out of the fun with exceedingly slow charging times. [eprotiva] wanted to change this, so he rigged up a fast charging solution for his cargo bike.

Level 2 electric vehicle chargers typically output power at 7 kW with the idea you will fill up your electric car overnight, but when converted down to 60 V DC for a DJI Agras T10 battery, [eprotiva] is able to charge from 20% to 100% capacity in as little as 7 minutes. He originally picked this setup for maxing the regen capability of the bike, but with the high current capability, he found it had the added bonus of fast charging.

The setup uses a Tesla (NACS) plug since they are the most plentiful destination charger, but an adapter allows him to also connect to a J1772 Type 1 connector. The EV charging cable is converted to a standard 240 V computer cable which feeds power to a drone charger. This charger can be set to “fast charge” and then feeds into the battery unit. As an added bonus, many chargers that do cost money don’t start charging until after the first five minutes, so the bike is even cheaper to power than you’d expect.

For some reason, you can watch him do this on TikTok too.

If you too want to join the Personal EV Revolution, be sure to checkout how to choose the right battery for your vehicle and a short history of the Segway.

The Challenge Of Weather Modification In The Face Of Climate Change

September 18, 2023 by 80 Comments

Over the past decades we have been able to observe a change in the Earth’s climate, caused by an increasing amount of energy being retained in the atmosphere. This in turn has affected weather systems around the globe, causing more extreme weather. As a result, the prospect of weather control is more relevant than ever for the nations which are most directly impacted by severe rain and winds.  Although the concept of weather modification is not new, it used to be primarily focused on rather limited aspects, such as cloud seeding to increase precipitation.

Recent proposals such as Japan’s weather modification moonshot program seek to find ways to prevent or lessen the impact of torrential rains, typhoons and similar extreme weather events which accompany climate change.  This proposal is part of Japan’s multi-topic Moonshot R&D program which seeks to advance the state of the art in a wide range of fields in a very significant way by 2050. As far as weather modification is concerned, this naturally raises many questions. Clearly we are capable of affecting the climate through emissions of e.g. greenhouse gases and large-scale construction, but are there ways in which humans can affect the climate and weather in a more refined manner that benefits society, or is this something which will remain beyond our grasp for the foreseeable future?

Continue reading “The Challenge Of Weather Modification In The Face Of Climate Change” →

Sailor Hat Adds Graceful Shutdown To Pis

September 18, 2023 by 45 Comments

Even though Windows and other operating systems constantly remind us to properly eject storage devices before removing them, plenty of people won’t heed those warnings until they finally corrupt a drive and cause all kinds of data loss and other catastrophes. It’s not just USB jump drives that can get corrupted, though. Any storage medium can become unusable if certain actions are being taken when the power is suddenly removed. That includes the SD cards on Raspberry Pis, too, and if your power isn’t reliable you might consider this hat to ensure they shut down properly during power losses.

The Raspberry Pi hat is centered around a series of supercapacitors which provide power for the Pi temporarily. The hat also communicates with the Pi to let it know there is a loss of power, so that the Pi can automatically shut itself down in that situation to prevent corrupting the memory card. The hat is more than just a set of backup capacitors, though. The device is capable of taking input power from a wide range of sources and filtering it for the power requirements of the Pi, especially in applications like boats and passenger vehicles where the input power might be somewhat noisy. There’s an optocoupled CAN bus interface as well for those looking to use this for automotive applications.

The entire project is also available on the project’s GitHub page for those wishing to build their own. Some sort of power backup is a good idea for any computer, though, not just Raspberry Pis. We’ve seen uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) with enough power to run an entire house including its computers, to smaller ones that’ll just keep your Internet online during a power outage.

Continue reading “Sailor Hat Adds Graceful Shutdown To Pis” →

Nitinol tire

Nitinol Is A Material We Need To Be Playing With More

September 18, 2023 by 51 Comments

Another Kickstarter, another opportunity for people to get mad at delayed and poorly functioning (if delivered at all) gadgets. This project aims to make airless tires for bikes and scooters using nitinol, and despite the company’s failed attempt at pedaling their wares on Shark Tank last year, the campaign has already more than quadrupled its funding goal.

The real star of the show here is NiTinol, a shape metal alloy composed of nickel and titanium. We should soon see a real commercial application of this miracle metal, and not long after we’ll see what happens when the rubber meets the road on these airless tires and their long-term performance. It’s not accurate to say they don’t use rubber; they just use LESS, because they’re still treaded, albeit with a layer that is adhered to the metal coil, and you don’t need tubes, either. The tread will still wear down and needs to be replaced occasionally for the lifetime of the tire, but the real advantage is never having a flat tire again. Considering how inconvenient flats are and the number of meetings I’ve been late commuting to because of an unplanned rapid deflation, these tires might be worth it. If you’re wondering why they’re so expensive, some napkin calculations of the nitinol coil have somewhere between 100 ft – 200 ft of wire per wheel, and at $1-2/ft, the raw materials alone before assembly make it an expensive piece of kit.

So what’s so cool about nitinol that it’s worth playing with, and what does it do that spring steel or stainless steel can’t? Well, you can soak it in acid for a year, and it will continue unaffected. It has excellent bio-compatibility, so you can put it in someone’s arteries as a stent, and it will go through tens of millions of cycles without cracking. It’s 10 times better at recovery and lighter, and it’s not magnetic, which can be useful. The memory capability is handy, too, because it means you can rapidly prototype springs, then heat and quench them to set their memory and easily adjust them.

Admittedly, I don’t have a use for it right now. But just like the coils of nichrome and piano wire waiting anxiously in my bins for their opportunity to shine, nitinol is screaming for a fun use.