Author: Bryan Cockfield

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Custom Electric Motorcycle Packs 6 KW

May 26, 2019 by 16 Comments

If you only need to travel at around 25 mph around town or to get a short distance to work, an electric bicycle might just be the best thing you can ride. It’s cheap, quick, and fun, and sometimes a great way to get some exercise too. If you want to dial up the amount of excitement, though, you’re going to want something with a little more power and speed. Something like an old dirt bike converted to a 6 kW electric motorcycle.

This is the latest build from [Boom Electric Cycles] and uses the frame from an early-90s Suzuki dirt bike as the foundation. From there it’s all new, though, as the engine was removed and replaced with 3 kW hub motors in each of the wheels. A 72-volt custom battery with 240 18650 cells pushed the amps through the motors, making this bike able to keep up anywhere except the fastest highways (if it’s street legal at all…).

Having about eight times more power than is found in a typical electric bicycle is sure to be a blast, but this build isn’t quite finished yet. Some of the trim panels need to be finished and the suspension needs to be adjusted, but it looks like it’ll be out and about any day now. Until then you’ll have to be satisfied with other projects that managed to cram in 3 kW per wheel.

Better Simulators With Homemade Potentiometers

May 24, 2019 by 21 Comments

Perhaps you’ve played a flight simulator before, using something like a mouse and keyboard. That’s a fine experience, but like any other activity you can get a lot more out of it if you put a little more effort into the experience. Some will upgrade to a joystick for a modest improvement, and others will build incredible accurate cockpit replicas down to the smallest detail. The builders of these “pits” are always looking for ways of improving their setups, and it’s from this world that we find a method of building specialized, inexpensive hall-effect sensors.

A hall-effect sensor is a circuit that outputs a voltage based on the presence of an external magnetic field. These can be used to make compasses, but with a permanent magnet in close proximity can also be used to create a potentiometer-like device at lower cost and with higher precision than a similarly-priced pot. There was a method of building these in the simulator world using the housing of a Bic pen and some strong glue, but [LocNar] has improved on this method as well. He repurposed some bearings and some stock metal tubing in order to fabricate a professional-level sensor at a fraction of the cost.

This build is essentially a solution for anyone needing a potentiometer that’s easier to build, less expensive, has higher precision, and interacts with a digital input in a much more predictable (and programmable) way. Certainly this has applications in the simulator world, but will work for many other applications. If you’ve never thought about the intricacies (and shortcomings) of potentiometers, some other folks have taken a deep dive into that as well.

Thanks to [Keith O] for the tip!

Novice Coders Can Create Classic Game Boy Games

May 22, 2019 by 5 Comments

It takes a lot of work to build a modern video game. Typically an entire company will spend months (at least) developing the gameplay, selecting or programming an engine, and working out the bugs. This amount of effort isn’t strictly necessary for older video game systems though, and homebrew developers are quite often able to develop entire games singlehandedly for classic systems. In the past it would have taken some special software, programming knowledge, and possibly hardware, but now anyone can build games for the original Game Boy with minimal barriers of entry.

The project is known as GB Studio and allows people to develop homebrew games for the 8-bit handheld system without programming knowledge. Once built, the games can be played on any emulator or even loaded onto a cartridge and played on original hardware if a flash cart is available. Graphics can be created with anything that can create a .png image, and there are also some features that allow the game to be played over a web browser or on a mobile device.

While it seems like the gameplay is limited to RPG-style games, this is still an impressive feat, and highly useful for anyone curious about game development. It could also be an entry into more involved game programming if it makes the code of the games available to the user. It could even lead to things like emulating entire cartridges on the original hardware.

Thanks to [Thomas] for the tip!

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Bringing PalmOS Back To Life

May 21, 2019 by 24 Comments

Ten years is almost ancient history in the computing world. Going back twelve years is almost unheard of, but that’s about the time that Palm released the last version of their famed PalmOS, an operating system for small, handheld devices that predated Apple’s first smartphone by yet another ten years. As with all pieces of good software there remain devotees, but with something that hasn’t been updated in a decade there’s a lot of work to be done. [Dmitry.GR] set about doing that work, and making a workable Palm device for the modern times.

He goes into incredible detail on this build, but there are some broad takeaways from the project. First, Palm never really released all of the tools that developers would need to build software easily, including documentation of the API system. Since a new device is being constructed, a lot of this needs to be sorted out. Even a kernel was built from scratch for this project, since using a prebuilt one such as Linux was not possible. There were many other pieces of software needed in order to get a working operating system together running on an ARM processor, which he calls rePalm.

There are many other facets of this project that we aren’t able to get into in this limited space, but if you’re at all interested in operating systems or if you fondly remember the pre-smartphone era devices such the various Palm PDAs that were available in the late ’90s and early ’00s, it’s worth taking a look at this one. And if you’d like to see [Dmitry.GR]’s expertise with ARM, he is well-versed.

Thanks to [furre] for the tip!

The Rhysonic Wheel Automates Live Music

May 18, 2019 by 10 Comments

Making waves in the music world is getting harder. Almost anyone who has access to the internet also has access to a few guitars and maybe knows a drummer or can program a drum machine. With all that competition it can be difficult to stand out. Rather than go with a typical band setup or self-producing mediocre rap tracks, though, you could build your own unique musical instrument from scratch and use it to make your music, and your live performances, one-of-a-kind.

[Pete O’Connell]’s instrument is known as the Rhysonic Wheel, which he created over the course of a year in his garage. The device consists of several wheels, all driven at the same speed and with a common shaft. At different locations on each of the wheels, there are pieces of either metal or rubber attached to strings. The metal and rubber bits fling around and can strike various other instruments at specified intervals. [Pete O’Connell] uses them to hit a series of percussion instruments, a set of bells, and even to play a guitar later on in the performance.

While it looks somewhat dangerous, we think that it adds a level of excitement to an already talented musical performance. After all, in skilled hands, any number of things can be used to create an engaging and unparalleled musical performance with all kinds of sounds most of us have never heard before.

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Repairing A Catastrophic Failure: The Oroville Dam Update

May 17, 2019 by 45 Comments

More than two years ago, the largest dam in the United States experienced a catastrophic failure of its main spillway, the primary means by which operators of the dam prevent the lake from cresting its pen. The spillway failure caused so much erosion that the hydroelectric plant could not operate, further worsening the situation. In a few days, the dam was finally put to its design limitations, and water began flowing down an emergency spillway that had never been used, prompting the evacuation of 188,000 people living in downstream communities.

Since the time that this crisis came to a head, crews have been working around the clock to repair the main and emergency spillways in order to ensure that one of the largest pieces of infrastructure in the wealthiest country in the world does not suffer a complete failure. The dam’s spillways were reopened recently on April 2, in time for this year’s snow melting, and so far everything looks good.

The repair work was a true feat of engineering, and perhaps a logistics miracle as well. The video below goes over a lot of the raw materials inputs that were needed, but the one that stuck out the most was that a dump truck full of roller-compacted concrete was emptied every five minutes over the entire course of the repair — enough to build a sidewalk from the Oroville Dam to Texas. Part of the reason for the use of such an incredible amount of concrete was that it wasn’t just used to repair the main spillway. An enormous “splash pad” for the emergency spillway was also constructed to limit erosion in the event that it must be used again. But the full change goes beyond concrete and rebar. Join me after the break as I try to wrap my mind around the full scope of the Oroville Dam repair.

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MIDI Synthesizer From A Sega Genesis

May 15, 2019 by 11 Comments

[Aidan] is really into FM synthesis chips for creating audio, and one of the most interesting chips from that era is found on the Sega Genesis. Anyone involved in the console wars at that time certainly remembers the classic, unique sound that those video game systems were able to produce, so [Aidan] built a device using a sound chip from a Genesis to play any piece of music from any game. The second iteration of that project, though, is able to use those same sound files as a MIDI synthesizer.

The interesting aspect of these chips is how they use registers to change the audio output. Essentially, there is a complicated register map (one section of his write-up is simply called “Register Hell”) that can be called in order to access the various types of effects one would normally see on a synthesizer. It’s not straightforward at all, though, and got even more complicated once [Aidan] started adding MIDI functionality to it as well. Once he finished sifting through the Sega Genesis technical manuals and a bunch of registers, though, he had a unique synthesizer working that doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard, unless you’ve ever played a Genesis.

If you’d like to check out his first project, the MegaBlaster, which plays the sound files of the old Genesis games directly, we featured that a while ago. Keep in mind though that his latest project isn’t just an updated MegaBlaster, though. He built this entire thing from the ground up.

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