[Douglas] hometown Goshen, Indiana takes the state’s motto ‘The Crossroads of America’ seriously, at least when it comes to trains. The city is the meeting point of three heavily frequented railroad tracks that cross near the center of town, resulting in a car-traffic nightmare. When everybody agrees that a situation is bad, it is time to quantify exactly how bad it is. [Douglas] stepped up for this task and delivered.
He describes himself as cheap, and the gear he used to analyze the railroad traffic at a crossing visible from his home certainly fits the bill: a decades-old webcam, a scratched telephoto lens and a laptop with a damaged hinge.
With the hardware in place, the next step was to write the software to count and time passing trains. Doing this in stable conditions with reasonable equipment would pose no problem to any modern image processing library, but challenged with variable lighting and poor image quality, [Douglas] needed another solution.
Instead of looking for actual trains, [Douglas] decided to watch the crossing signals. His program crops the webcam image and then compares the average brightness of the left and right halves to detect blinking. This rudimentary solution is robust enough to handle low light conditions as well as morning glare and passing cars.
The rest is verifying the data, making it fit for processing, and then combining it with publicly available data on car traffic at the affected intersections to estimate impact. The next council meeting will find [Douglas] well prepared. Traffic issues are a great field for citizen science as shown in Stuttgart earlier. If the idea of bolting old lenses to webcams intrigues you, we got you covered as well.
The power system is another matter entirely. 
We have to admit that we raised a wary eyebrow as we first watched [MakerMan]’s video below. We thought it was going to be just another hoverboard hack at first, but as we watched, there were some pretty impressive fabrication skills on display. Yes, the project does start with tearing into a defunct hoverboard for parts, primarily one wheel motor and the battery pack. But after that, [MakerMan] took off on a metalworking tear. Parts of the hoverboard chassis were attached to a frame built from solid bar stock — we’ll admit never having seen curves fabricated in quite that way before. The dead 18650 in the battery pack was identified and replaced, and a controller from an e-bike was wired up. Fitted with a thumb throttle and with a bit of padding on the crossbar, it’s almost a ride-upon but not quite. It seems to move along at quite a clip, even making allowances for the time-compression on the video.
