Author: Navarre Bartz

338 Articles

A two door pickup or ute in white with a black hood and blue accents. It's built from a chopped up BMW i3 REX EV.

BMW I3 Mod Brings Small Trucks To The EV Future

October 26, 2026 by 33 Comments

Trucks are handy, especially if you’ve got messy or dirty loads, but there aren’t a lot of options if you want a small electric pickup yet. [Michael Pick] decided to convert a BMW i3 into a utility vehicle.

After getting a new 12 V battery and cleaning the car up, [Pick] proceeded to disassemble the interior and remove the hatch from the car. Once he could look at the bones, he planned out the best places for the cut lines and removed the back half of the cabin.

The bed is built from plywood coated in penetrating epoxy and bedliner for weatherproofing, and special care was taken to seal the interface between the cabin and bed as the main electronics for the vehicle are housed in a compartment directly below. The taillight electronics were rehoused as the OEM lenses were too large to fit next to the tailgate opening.

The i3 has graced these pages before with a battery upgrade, and we’d be remiss not to remind you of the most famous EV to truck conversion, Truckla.

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Four black plastic devices, two with a black, stubby antenna, sit on a blue cutting mat with white guidelines. There is also a PCB and a couple grey-ish clips in the assortment. One of the devices is open, showing another PCB with various components including a GPS antenna and LoRa radio. A silhouette of a dog is screen printed next to the text "LIA" on the PCBs, and the same text and image is present in the shell of the device in the top center.

Meshtastic Pet Tracking

October 25, 2026 by 14 Comments

Most commercial pet trackers require a subscription or network connection to function. [Jon G Aguado] wanted a better way and designed LIA, a Meshtastic collar tracker.

LIA uses a custom PCB containing a ESP32-S3, LoRa radio, GPS/GNSS receiver, and a charge controller for the 18650 or 5023450 pouch Li-ion cell powering the device. Everything fits inside a 3D printed enclosure, and the device is charged via a magnetic 4-pin USB pogo connector to increase weather resistance.

One of the neat features of this particular tracker is that [Aguado] gave it two different power modes. High power gets a location fix every 30 seconds and has a pair of bright LEDs for visual assistance, low power only gets a fix every minute or so, and it can also be set to off, which is something we wish more device manufacturers remembered should be an option.

We hope anyone planning on using Meshtastic and LoRa in the US is aware of the issues surrounding FCC compliance, and if you want to track your pet another way, maybe KineFox is an option?

A person with blonde hair and light skin in a black t-shirt points at an image of a large QR code with what appear to be pictographic humans dancing in place of the usual blocky squares between the finding squares.

Reading QR Codes By Hand

October 21, 2026 by 12 Comments

QR codes can be a handy way to send a link or contact details without all that tedious mucking about with typing in a link, but they aren’t very useful without a smartphone to decode them. [Noel Friedrich] wondered if there was a way to do it by hand.

If it all seems a bit daunting at first, [Friedrich]’s write-up helps you work through copying a QR code to paper and then decoding it, as long as it’s version 1-5. Slashes in the template tell you where error correction has been applied to the code and you need to flip the bit back to what it was.

[Friedrich] then goes into some more details with a practical example of how the error correction works and how to exploit the ways QR codes are generated and read to make artistic QR codes. This even works to make human readable codes (without the worksheet), although the quality of the text still makes it somewhat challenging.

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured reading QR codes without a computer, but once you learn, maybe this QR code clock will be a bit more useful!

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A series of ten close up images of two pieces of coral. In the first, on the top left, the coral on the left is bright white while the one on the right is brown with darker brown spots. Text reads: "Week 0." The last image, on the bottom right, shows both pieces of coral as brown with darker brown spots and the text, "Week 9." The intervening images show the white, dead coral, slowly becoming more brown as time progresses.

Spreading Life To Bleached Coral

October 20, 2026 by 18 Comments

Coral bleaching is a major problem for ocean ecosystems as the ocean gets warmer. Researchers at Stanford have found a new method for regenerating bleached corals.

Scientists working on coral found that when they had a bleached and healthy example accidentally touching in the lab, the symbionts from the healthy coral that make its food were able to spread to the bleached coral, reviving it in a matter of weeks. Contact was only required for one week, although three days was sufficient in a few cases. The effect only seems to work with corals of the same genet as the healthy corals of other genets just take over the bleached coral antagonistically.

This is particularly exciting, as areas where not all coral has bleached may indicate the presence of symbionts that are more heat tolerant, and being able to spread these symbionts to their neighbors quickly can greatly speed up the process of coral regeneration and save the reef. Coral reefs are some of the most vibrant ecosystems in the ocean, so if you save the coral, you can save many other species as well that rely on them.

If you’d like to explore how the coral is doing near you, perhaps you should try an open ROV or a bionic jellyfish?

A shiny, silver vehicle with tools on a mesh rack on the back half and a large open cab up front drives across a grassy field under blue, partly cloudy skies. A person in a black shirt stands in the background with a drone hovering above their head. Two women in white helmets are piloting the vehicle from the cab.

Driving On The Moon At A Blistering 11.6 MPH

October 19, 2026 by 28 Comments

As NASA continues humanity’s slow march back to the Moon, different pieces of the puzzle of establishing a more permanent base there are falling into place. One of these pieces is the the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTR), and [Cleo Abram] and [Michelle Khare] got a look at the LTR candidate from Lunar Outpost.

Designed to help astronauts traverse the lunar surface as well as function as a semi-autonomous rover when uncrewed, the LTR will be an integral part to any future Moon base. NASA announced earlier this year that it would be moving forward with the LTR featured in this video and another from competitor Astrolab. Regardless of manufacturer, the LTR will have to deal with some wild conditions in the lunar environment.

Lunar dust is abrasive, so the LTR generates an electric current to pull the dust under the truck to prevent it from entering the cab of the vehicle as it moves along. Given the extreme temperature swings on the moon (-200˚C to 200˚C), the space truck will also be fitted with wire mesh tires as nobody wants to be changing a flat in space. The two seats in the cab are oversized and can help lift the astronauts up as space suits hamper their agility to a significant degree. There are compartments for storing samples, and the truck has a robot arm that can grab samples to bring back if no one is along for the ride.

We’ve still got a few years before crews arrive on the moon, but when they do, there’s a good chance they’ll be using the LTR to explore the lunar south pole in hopes of water.

Continue reading “Driving On The Moon At A Blistering 11.6 MPH” →

A drawing of a battery cell with gunk on the labeled anode and cathode called the "thick and inactive interphase layer." An icon of a dead battery with two red bars within a pictograph of a battery is superimposed. An arrow points to the right to a cleaner looking cell with a full battery icon with green bars inside showing the cell after regeneration.

A Simple Solution For Streamlining Battery Recycling

September 30, 2026 by 14 Comments

Lithium batteries have become the backbone of many modern devices ranging from toothbrushes to semi trucks, so what are we going to do with them when these rechargeable cells finally die? Researchers at Cornell have identified a way to streamline the recycling process.

Most current lithium battery recycling involves grinding up the batteries and separating active material from other components like the casing, current collectors, etc. These materials are then processed and turned back into fresh material for a new batch of batteries. Taking everything all the way down to rebuild it is time and labor consuming, and therefore expensive, especially in light of increasingly lower prices for lithium.

The researchers found that by electrochemically dissolving the inactive electrode–electrolyte interphase layers that built up over time, they could rejuvenate the electrode without completely taking it apart. This direct electrode-to-electrode regeneration (DEER) uses 1,3-dimethyl-2-imidazolidinone (DMI) as a solvent for the process. Once reassembled, these regenerated cells have up to 95% of their original capacity while cutting the cost of recycling by over half.

If you’re looking to reuse a pack before sending it to the recycler, may we suggest a whole house battery from an old EV pack and how to integrate them safely.

A small orange car with a bold horizontal white stripe and the text "XP 512E" emblazoned on the side. The footprint of the vehicle barely exceeds the size of the seats, almost like an Isetta, but the top canopy opens upward and the lower front fascia contains a side opening door. If it were green, it would probably be what an LLM would generate with the prompt, "Make a car that looks like a frog."

GM’s Experimental EV From 1969

September 24, 2026 by 30 Comments

Electricity is the once and future drivetrain for automobiles, but until the advent of lithium batteries their capabilities were somewhat modest. One EV blip on the automotive timeline is the XP-512E commuter prototype by GM.

The 60s saw a wide variety of interesting experiments in the automobile space, and both GM and AMC were evaluating the possibilities of a return to electric cars for short journeys. GM wasn’t set on a particular drivetrain for their new experimental commuter cars, so the XP 512 became a trio with conventional, hybrid, and electric variants. Each car was a two seater with a fiberglass body and steel chassis. The canopy could lift and a small door in the front swung to the side for access to the cockpit. Some images from the time show the car without the canopy and just the rollbar, giving you a very small convertible (83″/2108 mm long).

Lead acid was the only viable traction battery until the 1990s, so the 1,250 lb vehicle was limited to a top speed of 30 mph and a range of 50 miles. GM was exploring a number of alternatives at the time including another blast from the automotive past, steam power, in an effort to reduce the issues of smog and air pollution that plagued cities beset by droves of V-8 powered sedans. While the XP-512E and the AMC Amitron never made it to production, they’re an interesting reminder that technologies that seem infeasible today may just need to bake a bit longer.

We have some thoughts about the opportunities afforded by electric cars, but it’s probably a good thing we didn’t get nuclear powered automobiles.

Continue reading “GM’s Experimental EV From 1969” →