Electric Volkspod Takes You On An Eco-friendly Beetle Cruise

October 3, 2020 by Sven Gregori 9 Comments

The Volkswagen Beetle is a true automobile icon, and while it may not be the fastest or most breathtaking looking car ever built, its unmistakable shape with those elegant curvy fenders and bulgy lights holds a special place in many people’s hearts. And then it inspires them to build minibikes from those same parts.

[Brent Walter] is well know as an originator of the hobby, starting a little while ago with his Volkspod. Inspired by [Brent’s] work, [Jonah Mikesell] decided to give it his own try, but unlike the original design that uses an actual minibike under the hood, he built an electric version of it, and painstakingly documented every step along the way.

The idea of the Volkspod is to take the Beetle’s two front fenders, weld them together to one symmetric body, and turn it into a small motorcycle. [Jonah]’s version does all that, but instead of taking a whole minibike as core of the project, he only uses a minibike frame and substitutes the engine with a 2000 Watt e-bike motor along with an e-bike battery pack. Fitting the frame within the dimensions of the fender construct required some extra welding work, but in the end, it all came nicely together, and with its red paint job, it kinda looks like something from a vintage post-apocalyptic sci-fi cross-genre movie. Watch him taking it for a spin in the video after the break.

Unfortunately, neither the original Volkspod nor this one has the roaring engine sound of an actual Beetle — which is akin to what the wings of a real-life beetle of similar size would probably sound like. But well, it’s always an option to fake that. And if [Jonah] ever feels the urge of a bigger engine, maybe a washing machine can help.

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The Amazing Technicolor Parts Organizer

October 3, 2020 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that anyone reading these words has struggled at one time or another to keep an ever growing collection of electronic bits and bobs from descending into absolute chaos. Tossing them all into plastic bins is at least a start down the road to long-term organization, but they still needed to be sorted and inventoried if you want to avoid the wasted time and money of buying parts you forgot you already had.

For his latest project, [Zack Freedman] decided to finally tackle the personal parts collection that he’s ended up lugging around for the last several years. The first half of the battle was just figuring out what he actually had, what he was likely to need down the line, and getting it all sorted out so he didn’t have to keep rummaging through a big pile to find what he needed. But it’s not enough to get organized, you also need to stay organized.

Which is why he then turned his attention to how all these newly sorted components would actually be stored going forward. He already had a trio of Harbor Freight bin organizers, but as one expects from that fine retailer, they were only marginally suitable for the task at hand. So [Zack] designed a 3D printed faceplate that could snap onto the original plastic bin. The new fronts made them easier to grab and featured an opening to accept a laser-etched plastic label.

To give them a little visual flair, he decided to print the faceplates using rainbow gradient filament. To prevent them from being random colors, he used the relatively obscure sequential slicing option so his Prusa i3 would print each faceplate in its entirety before moving over to the next one on the bed. This took far longer than doing them in parallel (especially since he had access to multiple printers), but makes for a much nicer aesthetic as the color smoothly transitions between each bin on the wall. It also has a practical benefit, as you can tell at a glance if any of the bins have found themselves in the wrong spot.

If you really want to go off the deep end, we’ve seen hackers light individual bins with RGB LEDs tied into a searchable inventory system. But for most hobbyists, simply learning when to purge would be more practical.

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Retrotechtacular: The $5,000 40 Pound HP Classroom Computer

October 2, 2020 by Al Williams 21 Comments

See if you can talk your local school district into buying a computer that costs about $5,000 and weighs 40 pounds. That was HP’s proposition to schools back in 1968 so really it is more like $35,000 today. The calculator had a CRT display for the RPN stack that you could mirror on a big screen. You could also get a printer or plotter add-on. Pretty hot stuff for the ’60s.

The 1970 videos promoting the HP 9100, posted by the [Computer History Archive Project], shows something we’d think of as a clunky calculator, although by the standards of the day it was a pretty good one with trig functions and a crude programming capability.

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M17 Aims To Replace Proprietary Ham Radio Protocols

October 2, 2020 by Al Williams 115 Comments

While M17 might sound like a new kind of automatic rifle (as actually, it is), we were referring to an open source project to create a ham radio transceiver. Instead of paraphrasing the project’s goals, we’ll simply quote them:

The goal here should be to kick the proprietary protocols off the airwaves, replace DMR, Fusion, D-Star, etc. To do that, it’s not just good enough to be open, it has to be legitimately competitive.

Like some other commercial protocols, M17 uses 4FSK along with error correction. The protocol allows for encryption, streaming, and the encoding of callsigns in messages. There are also provisions for framing IP packets to carry data. The protocol can handle voice and data in a point-to-point or broadcast topology.

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Flywheel Trebuchet Spins Right Round

October 2, 2020 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Most of us gained a familiarity with siege weapons from Age of Empires, and the march of technology has meant these relics aren’t typically seen on modern battlefields. However, development continues apace in the enthusiast community, and [Tom Stanton]’s latest trebuchet design puts a different spin on launching projectiles at speed.

The design takes advantage of the flywheel as an energy storage device. The flywheel is spun up to speed using a hand crank, through a timing belt and a set of hybrid 3D printed and CNC aluminium gears. Once spun up to sufficient angular velocity, a trigger releases the tennis ball payload from a sling, flinging it forth at speeds over 180 miles per hour.

Moving on from classical materials such as wood and nails, [Tom]’s latest design relies on aluminium in an effort to build something that won’t rot when left outside in the rain. The use of aluminium profiles also makes adjustment and redesigns easy, while providing the necessary adjustments to dial in things like release point and belt tension. We’ve featured a few different designs over the years; the walking-arm trebuchet is perhaps the most oddball of all. Video after the break.

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Voice Controlled RGB LEDs Go Big

October 2, 2020 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

When we see RGB LEDs used in a project, they’re often used more for aesthetic purposes than as a practical source of light. It’s an easy way to throw some color around, but certainly not the sort of thing you’d try to light up anything larger than a desk with. Apparently nobody explained the rules to [Brian Harms] before he built Light[s]well.

Believe it or not, this supersized light installation doesn’t use any exotic hardware you aren’t already familiar with. Fundamentally, what we’re looking at is a WiFi enabled Arduino MKR1000 driving strips of NeoPixel LEDs. It’s just on a far larger scale than we’re used to, with a massive 4 x 8 aluminum extrusion frame suspended over the living room.

Onto that frame, [Brian] has mounted an undulating diffuser made of 74 pieces of laser-cut cardstock. Invoking ideas of waves or clouds, the light looks like its of natural or even biological origin while at the same time having a distinctively otherworldly quality to it.

The effect is even more pronounced when the RGB LEDs kick in, thanks to the smooth transitions between colors. In the video after the break, you can see Light[s]well work its way from bright white to an animated rainbow. As an added touch, he added Alexa voice control through Arduino’s IoT Cloud service.

While LED home lighting is increasingly becoming the norm, projects like Light[s]well remind us that we aren’t really embracing the possibilities offered by the technology. The industry has tried so hard to make LEDs fit into the traditional role of incandescent bulbs, but perhaps its time to rethink things.

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Seek And Ye Shall Command

October 2, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 3 Comments

If we count all the screens in our lives, it takes a hot minute. Some of them are touchscreens, some need a mouse or keyboard, but we are accustomed to all the input devices. Not everyone can use the various methods, like cerebral palsy patients who rely on eye-tracking hardware. Traditionally, that only works on the connected computer, so switching from a chair-mounted screen to a tablet on the desk is not an option. To give folks the ability to control different computers effortlessly [Zack Freedman] is developing a head-mounted eye-tracker that is not tied to one computer. In a way, this is like a KVM switch, but way more futuristic. [Tony Stark] would be proud.

An infrared detector on the headset identifies compatible screens in line of sight and synchs up with its associated HID dongle. A headset-mounted color camera tracks the head position in relation to the screen while an IR camera scans the eye to calculate where the user is focusing. All the technology here is proven, but this new recipe could be a game-changer to anyone who has trouble with the traditional keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen. Maybe QR codes could assist the screen identification and orientation like how a Wii remote and sensor bar work together.