Transportation Hacks

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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 34 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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Rear view of the sand rail whizzing by.

When You Can’t Pick Between Electric And Jet Power, This Buggy Has You Covered

October 23, 2026 by 25 Comments

Technically, what [Macona] built with a surplus Garrett GTP30-150(F) turbine is not a dune buggy, but a sand rail, but it does have the delightfully rare combination of electric and turbine drive that is absolutely worth wading through a 53-page forum thread to learn about.

The turbine came bare as surplus, but [Marcona] used a pair of Kia/Hyundai HSG water-cooled motor-generators to turn it back into something very much like the APU it likely started out as. That’s APU as in “Auxiliary Power Unit” in this context, the little generator that keeps the lights on when your plane is sitting on the tarmac. That went into the sort of frame you’d once have put a VW bug engine in — and the 150 HP off the shaft of the turbine beats anything you’ll get with Wolfsburg’s little boxer motor, even after losses in the generator and motors. Even better, the whole assembly, which uses the electric motor from a Mitsubishi Outlander, likely doesn’t weigh any more than the internal combustion engine and transmission, so whatever you call this little off-roader it ought to move well. It certainly seems to in the demo video embedded below.

What it doesn’t do is sip fuel, the T-62 being rated at 19.3 gallons/hr at full load. Fuel efficiency is definitely not the motivation here. He’s absolutely not saving money, especially not with what jet fuel costs these days. It’s one of those projects done purely for the joy of it — where if you have to ask why, you’re barking up the wrong tree. The vehicle isn’t yet street legal, but [Marcona] is working on it.

If you do like the idea of this kind of series hybrid drive, Edison Motors of Canada is working on bringing it both to semitrucks and heavy trucks, and that is motivated by fuel savings. Continue reading “When You Can’t Pick Between Electric And Jet Power, This Buggy Has You Covered” →

An RV On A Bike

October 19, 2026 by 26 Comments

Bicycles are the ultimate form of transportation freedom. They’re easy to repair, parts are cheap, and they will travel almost anywhere for free, as long as the rider has enough calories. Their only real downside is dealing with car-dependent societies, but once a year there’s a place in the American desert that eschews all of this and [Attoparsec] decided to take this custom cargo bike modified into an RV out to Burning Man, a place and time that would be perfect for a build like this.

The build started out as a cargo bike, but not many of them have cargo areas long enough to support a sleeping human. To increase this storage capacity, the bed was extended towards the rear. Without moving the axle further back, though, this created a problem with tail-heaviness so two trailer jacks with wheels were added to the back to keep it from occasionally tipping up too far. The sleeping enclosure was built with rigid foam insulation and taped together, in a modified style common to the Burning Man event which helps keep out sun and playa dust. The bicycle recived one last upgrade to the chain to support the extra weight, and a solar-powered refrigerator, and then it was off to the desert.

The bike RV worked well in the end, and even handled a rain storm without the roof leaking. There were some problems with the customized drive train which were solved in the short term by pounding on one of the wheels occasionally with a hammer. [Attoparsec] left the event early for other reasons, though, and might not be back for a while. But vehicles like these are gaining in popularity, presuming there are safe places to ride them. [Paul Elkins] is often making ones like this gas-powered bicycle and trailer camper.

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Charlotte’s New Runway Gets A Digital Twin

October 19, 2026 by 4 Comments

The first viable powered aircraft predated the first proper runway by two decades. While it’s entirely possible to launch some planes from austere dirt or grass strips, the aviation world eventually realized that aircraft would be better off launching from a flat, paved surface.

Over the years, paving technology has gradually improved in the aviation world as it has for roads and highways. Now, there’s a project being built in Charlotte with new digital features that hopes to push the state of the art of runways even further.

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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.

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[Avery] standing inside the inflating envelope of his airship

Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship Is Supposed To Be On Fire

October 6, 2026 by 15 Comments

We’ve had a lot of flying hacks here over the years, and that includes just about any way to get airborne you can think of — but very few of those have been airships. Fewer still have been 27-foot thermal airships, like the one [Avery Flies] designed and put together recently.

A thermal airship, in case the name doesn’t give it away, is a dirigible hot air balloon. Like a hot air balloon, it gets its lift from the density difference between hot air and the regular atmosphere. Unlike a hot air balloon, it has control surfaces and an engine so it goes where you tell it to. The craft uses good-old-fashioned radio control, and except for the nylon envelope he spends the first 15 minutes of the video below designing and sewing up, the technology mostly comes from be from the world of R/C aircraft.

The big exception is of course the a propane burner used to generate heat, said propane being supplied by a pair of small green tanks such as you might use on a portable barbecue. Everything that moves is electric, though: there’s a 70 mm (about 2¾“) electric ducted fan acting to push the air up into the balloon so it keeps shape, and a great big brushless DC motor pushing an 18” (about 457 mm) prop for thrust. The steering servo is actually a repurposed winch servo from an R/C sailboat, rather than anything from the world of model aircraft. But it makes sense, as the meter-scale fabric rudder is more like a sail than the control surfaces of most R/C aircraft.

You might expect a blimp to be the biggest flying machine we’ve featured on Hackaday, but some truly giant-scale R/C aircraft have come our way in the past. We’ve also seen some pretty teeny blimps.

Continue reading “Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship Is Supposed To Be On Fire” →

Commodore 128 Becomes Marine Vessel Tracker

September 25, 2026 by 6 Comments

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a maritime radio communications tool used to allow different vessels to identify each other and communicate their movements and other telemetry. You can readily view a variety of AIS trackers online. Alternatively, you could build your own, and display the data on a retrocomputer from 40-plus years ago.

The concept is straightforward enough—it’s a Commodore 128 displaying vessel tracks from AIS data. The team behind AIS4CBM implemented this with assembly code to receive data over serial, parse and decode the AIS reports, and manage vessel data. Meanwhile, the front end is coded in BASIC 8, which provides useful graphic routines for plotting vessels on a map. There’s also a BASIC 7 text interface if you prefer to view the vessel data that way.

It’s worth noting that you can’t just run this on a barebones C128. AIS4CBM requires a 512 KiB REU RAM expansion, as well as 64 KiB VDC memory. You also need a SwiftLink compatible serial interface to get the data into the machine in the first place from your AIS receiver or other source. The project website notes that an Ultimate-II+ unit is a great way to fulfill most of these requirements with a single piece of hardware.

If you dig the project, you can check out a live stream from the C128 doing its thing below. We wouldn’t recommend a Commodore 128 if you’re a harbor master or otherwise commanding ships on the water. Still, it’s a fun project, and much like the NES that was set up to track planes with ADS-B data. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Commodore 128 Becomes Marine Vessel Tracker” →