Bringing Modern Technology To A Sled

February 12, 2024 by 17 Comments

Street sledding, a popular pastime in Norway, is an activity that is slowly dwindling in popularity, at least as far as [Justin] aka [Garage Avenger] has noticed. It used to be a fun way of getting around frozen lakes and roads during winter, and while some still have their sleds [Justin] wanted to see if there was a way to revitalize one of these sleds for the modern era. He’s equipped this one with powerful electric turbines than can quickly push the sled and a few passengers around the ice.

Since this particular sled is sized for child-sized passengers, fuel-burning jet engines have been omitted and replaced with electric motors that can spin their turbine blades at an impressive 80,000 rpm. The antique sled first needed to be refurbished, including removing the rust from the runners and reconditioning the wood. With a sturdy base ready to go, the sled gets a set of 3D printed cowlings for the turbines, a thumb throttle on the upgraded handlebars, and a big battery with an Arduino to bring it all together.

With everything assembled and a sheet of ice to try it out on, the powerful sled easily gets its passengers up to the 20-30 kph range depending on passenger weight and size. There’s a brake built on an old ice skate for emergency stops, and the sled was a huge hit for everyone at the skating pond. There are plenty of other ways to spruce up old sleds, too, like this one which adds a suspension for rocketing down unplowed roads.

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Feeding The Fire By Robot

January 15, 2024 by 23 Comments

It might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but one of the more carbon-neutral ways of heating one’s home is by burning wood. Since the carbon for the trees came out of the air a geologically insignificant amount of time ago, it’s in effect solar energy with extra steps. And with modern stoves and well-seasoned wood, air pollution is minimized as well. The only downside is needing to feed the fire frequently, which [Anders] solved by building a robot.

[Anders]’ system is centered around a boiler, a system which typically sits in a utility area like a basement and directs its heat to the home via another system, usually hot water. An Arduino Mega controls the system of old boat winches and various motors, with a grabber arm mounted at the end. The arm pinches each log from end to end, allowing it to grab the uneven logs one at a time. The robot also opens the boiler door and closes it again when the log is added, and then the system waits for the correct set of temperature conditions before grabbing another log and adding it. And everything can be monitored remotely with the help of an ESP32.

The robot is reportedly low-maintenance as well, thanks to its low speed and relatively low need for precision. The low speed also makes it fairly safe to work around, which was an important consideration because wood still needs to be added to a series of channels every so often to feed the robot, but this is much less often than one would have to feed logs into a boiler if doing this chore manually. It also improves on other automated wood-burning systems like pellet stoves, since you can skip the pellet-producing middleman step. It also eliminates the need to heat your home by burning fossil fuels, much like this semi-automated wood stove.

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Diesel Station Wagon Runs On Plastic

November 15, 2023 by 58 Comments

Old diesel engines from various car manufacturers like Mercedes and Volkswagen are highly prized even in modern times. Not only were these engines incredibly reliable and mechanically simple, but they can easily be modified to run on a wide variety of fuels. It’s common to see old Volkswagen Jettas or Mercedes 300Ds running on used vegetable oil or any other free flammable liquid that might otherwise end up in the garbage. [Gijs Schalkx] has an diesel Volvo 240 wagon, and rather than compete with all the other diesel owners looking for cooking oil, he modified this one to run on plastic waste instead. (Google Translate from Dutch)

While our Dutch language skills aren’t the best, what we gather about this project is that it uses standard solid plastic waste for fuel, but an intermediate step of cooking the plastic into a liquid is first needed. The apparatus on the roof is actually a plastic refinery which uses a small wood fire to break the plastic molecules into usable hydrocarbons, which are then sent to the engine for burning. The car is street legal and seems to operate like any other diesel of this vintage, although the fuel delivery system may not be able to provide it enough to get it going at very high speeds.

While it is possible to use wood to produce wood gas for fuel in an internal combustion engine like this wood gas-powered lawnmower, the hydrocarbon strings in plastic are essentially stabilized hydrocarbons from refining oil and have potentially much more available energy. Releasing this energy is generally difficult enough that used plastic is simply landfilled. [Gijs Schalkx] has made plenty of alternative fuel vehicles, too, like this moped that used locally-harvested swamp gas to ride around town.

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Scaled-Up Matches Are Hilarious And Moderately Effective

September 20, 2023 by 22 Comments

Regular matches are fine for lighting candles and the like, but they’re a bit small and fiddly to use. After seeing some giant prop matches used in a stage play, [Handy Bear] decided to see if they could build some functional extra-large matches at home.

The build starts with a square wooden dowel, cut into lengths to serve as the main body of the matches. Regular tiny matches were then harvested for their flammable matchheads, made of potassium chlorate. Sourcing the material this way is far simpler than attempting a chemical synthesis from raw materials. Once roughly ground, the material was glued on to the end of the wooden rod to finish the match. [Handy Bear] then whipped up a giant matchbox to suit, using the ignition strips from multiple smaller matchboxes in the process.

Impressively, the monster matches work, and work well. They readily ignite when struck, and are able to keep a strong flame burning for some time.  However they’re not quite potent enough to fully ignite the wood, so they don’t burn down like the real thing. We could see these being a great way to light a campfire with less hassle than regular matches, even if they are a bulky solution to the problem.

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Kerfmeter Measures Laser Cutter Kerf Allowances On The Fly

May 3, 2023 by 21 Comments

Nothing beats a laser cutter and a sheet of Baltic birch plywood or MDF when it comes to making quick, attractive enclosures. Burning out all the pieces and fitting them together with finger joints is super satisfying — right up until you realize that you didn’t quite get the kerf allowance right, and your pieces don’t fit together very nicely. If only there was a way to automate kerf measurement.

There is, in the form of Kerfmeter. It comes to us by way of the lab of [Patrick Baudisch] at the University of Potsdam, where they’ve come up with a clever way to measure the kerf of a laser cutter right during the cutting session. With the Kerfmeter mounted directly to the laser cutter head, a small test artifact based on an Archimedean spiral is cut into a corner of the workpiece. Pins on a small motor engage with the object and turn it until it jams in its hole; the wider the kerf, the greater the angle. Once the kerf is calculated, the rest of the design can be dilated by the proper amount to achieve a perfect fit. The video below shows it better than words can explain it.

What we like about this is its simplicity — all it involves is a motor and a microcontroller, plus a little software. It seems much faster than using a traditional kerf gauge, not to mention more precise. And while it does use up a little bit of material, the test pattern is really pretty small, all things considered. Seems like a reasonable trade-off to us. Still, if you want to figure out your kerfs the old-fashioned way, we’ve got you covered.

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Automating The Most Analog Of HVAC Equipment

February 20, 2023 by 35 Comments

Burning wood, while not a perfect heating solution, has a number of advantages over more modern heating appliances. It’s a renewable resource, doesn’t add carbon to the atmosphere over geologic time scales like fossil fuels do, can be harvested locally using simple tools, and it doesn’t require any modern infrastructure to support it. That being said, wood stoves aren’t something that are very high-tech and don’t lend themselves particularly well to automation as a result, at least with the exception of this wood stove from [jotulf45v2].

While this doesn’t automate the loading or direct control of a modern pellet stove, it does help [jotulf45v2] know when the best times are for loading more wood into the stove and helps keep the stove in the right temperature range to avoid the dangerous formation of creosote on the inside of his chimney caused by low temperature burns. Two temperature sensors, one on the stovetop and the other on the stove pipe, monitor the stove exhaust temperature. They feed data to a Node-RED system running on a Raspberry Pi which automatically notifies the user by text message when certain stove temperatures are reached.

For anyone heating with wood, tools like this are indispensable to help avoid spending an otherwise unnecessary amount of time getting a fire up to temperature quickly without over-firing the stove. Modern pellet stoves have some more modern conveniences like this built in, but many of the perks of using cord wood are lost with these devices. There are plenty of other ways to heat with wood too; take a look at this custom wood boiler which serves as a hot water heater.

2022: As The Hardware World Turns

January 3, 2023 by 30 Comments

Well folks, we made it through another one. While it would be a stretch to call 2022 a good year for those of us in the hacking and making community, the light at the end of the tunnel does seem decidedly brighter now than it did this time 365 days ago. It might even be safe to show some legitimate optimism for the year ahead, but then again I was counting on my Tesla stocks to be a long-term investment, so what the hell do I know about predicting the future.

Eh, my kids probably weren’t going to college anyway.

Thankfully hindsight always affords us a bit of wisdom, deservedly or otherwise. Now that 2022 is officially in the rearview mirror, it’s a good time to look back on the highs (and lows) of the last twelve months. Good or bad, these are the stories that will stick out in our collective minds when we think back on this period of our lives.

Oh sure, some might wish they could take the Men in Black route and forget these last few years ever happened, but it doesn’t work that way. In fact, given the tumultuous times we’re currently living in, it seems more likely than not that at some point we’ll find ourselves having to explain the whole thing to some future generation as they stare up at us wide-eyed around a roaring fire. Though with the way this timeline is going, the source of said fire might be the smoldering remains of an overturned urban assault robot that you just destroyed.

So while it’s still fresh in our minds, and before 2023 has a chance to impose any new disasters on us, let’s take a trip back through some of the biggest stories and themes of the last year.

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