A grey car sits in the background out of focus, its front facing the camera. It sits over an asphalt roadway with a metal rail extending from the foreground to behind the car in the distance. The rail has a two parallel slots and screws surrounding the slots running down the rail.

What Happened To Sweden’s Slot Car EV Road?

March 1, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 60 Comments

Many EVs can charge 80% of their battery in a matter of minutes, but for some applications range anxiety and charge time are still a concern. One possible solution is an embedded electrical rail in the road like the [eRoadArlanda] that Sweden unveiled in 2016.

Overhead electrical wires like those used in trolleys have been around since the 1800s, and there have been some tests with inductive coils in the roadway, but the 2 km [eRoadArlanda] takes the concept of the slot car to the next level. The top of the rail is grounded while the live conductor is kept well underground beneath the two parallel slots. Power is only delivered when a vehicle passes over the rail with a retractable contactor, reducing danger for pedestrians, animals, and other vehicles.

One of the big advantages of this technology being in the road bed is that both passenger and commercial vehicles could use it unlike an overhead wire system that would require some seriously tall pantographs for your family car. Testing over several Swedish winters shows that the system can shed snow and ice as well as rain and other road debris.

Unfortunately, the project’s website has gone dark, and the project manager didn’t respond when we reached out for comment. If there are any readers in Sweden with an update, let us know in the comments!

We’ve covered both overhead wire and embedded inductive coil power systems here before if you’re interested in EV driving with (virtually) unlimited range.

Continue reading “What Happened To Sweden’s Slot Car EV Road?” →

A man sits in front of a wooden table. There is a black box with a number of knobs hand-labeled on blue painter's tape. A white breadboard with a number of wires protruding from it is visible on the box's left side. An oscilliscope is behind the black box and has a yellow waveform displaying on its screen.

A More Expressive Synth Via Flexure

February 28, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 13 Comments

Synthesizers can make some great music, but sometimes they feel a bit robotic in comparison to their analog counterparts. [Sound Werkshop] built a “minimum viable” expressive synth to overcome this challenge. (YouTube)

Dubbed “The Wiggler,” [Sound Werkshop]’s expressive synth centers on the idea of using a flexure as a means to control vibrato and volume. Side-to-side and vertical movement of the flexure is detected with a pair of linear hall effect sensors that feed into the Daisy Seed microcontroller to modify the patch.

The build itself is a large 3D printed base with room for the flexure and a couple of breadboards for prototyping the circuits. The keys are capacitive touch pads, and everything is currently held in place with hot glue. [Sound Werkshop] goes into detail in the video (below the break) on what the various knobs and switches do with an emphasis on how it was designed for ease of use.

If you want to learn more about flexures, be sure to checkout this Open Source Flexure Construction Kit.

Continue reading “A More Expressive Synth Via Flexure” →

A series of five cymbals sitting on white and black speckled carpet in front of a green loveseat. Each cymbal is assembled from four printed sections. Their colors from left to right are yellow and grey, red and black, black, teal and black, and white and black. A sixth, grey and black cymbal is sitting in the middle of the loveseat cushion.

Challenging The Limits Of 3D Printing With Cymbals

February 28, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 22 Comments

We’re big believers in 3D printing here at Hackaday, but it’s important to recognize that there are plenty of applications where additive manufacturing (at least, from a desktop machine) just isn’t suitable. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to see what happens if you try. For example, [The Drum Thing] wanted to test the limits of 3D printing by printing a set of cymbals.

[The Drum Thing] had a friend design a cymbal in CAD and then the printed quarters were glued together. In the name of science, they produced them in six different materials to compare performance. Each cymbal was played for a short period or until it failed, including some very interesting slow motion camera work showing the vibrations traveling through the cymbals.

As one might expect, bashing “wafer thin” pieces of printed plastic with a wooden drumstick didn’t work out well for most of the cymbals, although the TPU, carbon fiber, and nylon cymbals were did largely survive their time in the limelight. The other cymbals all failed, either shattering, cracking, or failing at the glue joints. Based on the video, it seems the same glue was used for all of the cymbals, so making sure to have a better match between material and adhesive could help with the glue failures.

Maybe future testing can involve playing these cymbals with a quadrotor?

Continue reading “Challenging The Limits Of 3D Printing With Cymbals” →

A person holds a bundle of white, black, and blue wires. The left hand side of the wires are wrapped with black tape. The wires are inside a wire wrapping machine with a grey plastic "C" which rotates inside seven small pulleys. A large pulley in the background drives three of the pulleys to rotate the "C" around and wrap the wires with tape from the spool attached to the "C."

DIY Tool Makes Wrapping Wiring Harnesses A Breeze

February 26, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 17 Comments

If you’re making a lot of wiring harnesses, wrapping them can become a bit of a drag. [Well Done Tips] wanted to make this process easier and built a wiring harness wrapping machine.

The “C” shape of this wrapping machine means that you can wrap wires that are still attached at one or both ends, as you don’t have to pull the wires all the way through the machine. The plastic “C” rotates inside a series of pulleys with three of them driven by a belt attached to an electric motor. A foot pedal actuates the motor and speed is controlled by a rotary dial on the motor controller board.

Since this is battery powered, you could wrap wires virtually anywhere without needing to be near a wall outlet. This little machine seems like it would be really great if you need to wrap a ton of wire and shouldn’t be too complicated to build. Those are some of our favorite hacks.

If you’re wanting more wire harness fun, try this simple online wiring harness tool or see how the automotive industry handles harnesses.

Continue reading “DIY Tool Makes Wrapping Wiring Harnesses A Breeze” →

A dark grey couch with a white pegboard on a drawer slide protruding from its arm. The pegboard has a magazine holder, pen holder, and several other miscellaneous bins holding odds and ends on it.

Sofa Armrest Is A Nifty Storage Spot

February 26, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 7 Comments

If you’re like us, you’re always in need of a little more space to store things. [Javier Guerrero] realized his sofa wasn’t living up to its full storage potential and designed this sofa armrest storage.

[Guerrero]’s sofa arms were hiding 80 liters of space, so he really wanted to do something with it. After disassembling them, he found his original plan of just cutting them up wouldn’t work due to the minimal structure inside. Not to be discouraged, he drew up some plans and built replicas from 15 mm plywood.

For one armrest, he made a single giant box that opens from the top where he can store a couple of folding chairs. On the other side, he made a shorter top-opening bin for charging phones and storing the remote. Underneath that is a large pull out drawer with a pegboard for organizational bliss.

The arms were upholstered using the fabric from the original arms plus a little extra from another slip cover. Separate arm modules and easily obtainable matching fabric aren’t a given for every couch, but we expect that almost any sofa with arms could benefit from this hack given a little ingenuity.

If you’re looking for more storage hacks, checkout this Modular Storage from Old Filament Spools, the Last Component Storage System You’d Ever Need, or the ever popular Gridfinity.

Two pairs of steel parallel pliers sit on a rough wooden benchtop. The pair on the left is open and the pair on the right is closed, demonstrating the parallel nature of the pliers' jaws over their entire range of motion. There are three brass pins flush with the steel surface of the handles and you can just barely make out the brass and copper filler material between the steel outer surfaces of the handles.

Producing A Pair Of Parallel Pliers

February 24, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 10 Comments

A regular pair of pliers is fine most of the time, but for delicate work with squarish objects you can’t go wrong with a pair of parallel pliers. [Neil Paskin] decided to make his own pair from scratch. (YouTube)

The jaws were machined down from round stock in [Paskin]’s mill before heat treating and tempering. The steel portions of the handles were cut from 16 gauge plate steel and half of them were stamped on a fly press to make the bridging section around the pivot bolt. The filler for the handles is copper on one side and brass on the other as [Paskin] didn’t have enough brass of the correct size to do both.

The steel and filler were joined with epoxy and copper pins before beveling the edges and sanding to give a comfortable contour to the handles. The bolts for the pliers started as ordinary hex bolts before being machined down on the lathe to a more aesthetically-pleasing shape and size. The final touches included electrolytically etching a logo into the bridge and then spraying down the pliers with a combination lubricant and corrosion preventative spray. This is surely a pair of pliers worth handing down through the generations.

For more mesmerizing machining, checkout this pocket safe or this tiny adjustable wrench.

Continue reading “Producing A Pair Of Parallel Pliers” →

Two people lounge over a wooden tabletop to lean on a large black laptop. It has a green leaf on its 43" LCD desktop and RGB lighting around its edge is glowing a slightly deeper shade of green.

Supersized Laptop Laughs In The Face Of Portability

February 23, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 18 Comments

Sometimes a project needs to go big, and [Evan and Katelyn] threw portability to the wind to build the “world’s biggest” laptop.

Stretching the believability of “bigger is better,” this laptop features a 43″ screen, an enormous un-ergonomic keyboard, and a trackpad that might be bigger than your hand. Not to be outdone by other gaming laptops, it also features RGB lighting and a logo that really pops with neon resin.

The pair started the build with an aluminum extrusion frame joined by hinges. Plywood forms the top lid and bottom of the device, and the interior was covered with a mix of vinyl and ABS to keep everything tidy. A nice detail is the windows cut in the area above the keyboard to keep an eye on the charge of the two battery packs powering the laptop. Weighing more than 100 pounds, we suspect that this won’t be the next revolution in computing.

If you need more supersized gadgets, maybe try out the world’s biggest working keyboard or this giant Xbox Series X?