Museums Should Be More Popular Than Theme Parks

July 11, 2014 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

One of the field trips that we set up as part of our Detroit tour was a trip to The Henry Ford Museum. After a rather disappointing first half hour wandering around the static exhibits of nicely polished cars we latched onto the part of the museum that’s starts the serotonin pump for anyone who is engineering-minded. There are amazing displays of early industrialization, including steam engines for factories, early power generators, and examples of early assembly line machinery. We’re going to cover that stuff in depth but editing it all together will take some time.

For now we wanted to give you a quick glimpse at a delightful exhibit of a Model T. You don’t just look at it; every morning the museum staff takes apart the entire vehicle and throughout the day helps museum-goers walk through the process of putting it back together.

Why isn’t this the model to supplant amusement parks? This hands-on work with real equipment — not just a model made to stand up to the masses — is pure gold for occupying curious people of all ages. The interaction with museum staff adds a tangible human element to the institution, and you just might learn something more than history in the process!

[Full Disclosure: The Henry Ford provided Hackaday with free admission — Thank You!]

A Most Impractical Gear Position Indicator

July 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

GPI A few years ago, [Pat] sent in a really nice gear position indicator for his Suzuki V-Strom. With a single seven-segment display , a small microcontorller, and wires tied right into the bike’s ECM, it’s more than enough to do its job, and is much cheaper than aftermarket gear indicators. A simple, elegant solution that does one job well. How could this possibly be any better?

‘Better’ is a relative term, and depending on what you’re optimizing for, a more complex solution can easily be superior. [Pat] figured tripling the value of his motorcycle is a worthwhile goal, so he replaced that seven-segment display with an oscilloscope. It’s the world’s only oscilloscope based motorcycle gear position indicator, and now [Pat] needs a really, really long extension cord.

Like the earlier, more practical version, This build reads the voltage off the bike’s ECM to determine what gear the bike is in. The current gear is then displayed on a Tek MDO3000 with two PWM pins on a microcontroller. Practical? No, but it does look cool. Video below.

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Tempo Keeping Drummer Leaves Viking Ship, Now Inspires Pedallers

June 13, 2014 by Rich Bremer 12 Comments

Bike Controlled Drum Machine

[Serdef] wrote in to tell us about a project he has recently created. It’s a drum beat generator that changes tempo depending on how fast you pedal your bike. This flies directly in the face of using music to keep your pedal timing consistent and up to speed.

The project started out with a tap-tempo drum rhythm pedal that [Serdef] had previously built. This device will generate a drum beat at a tempo corosponding with the time between 2 input signals. This type of device allows someone, say a guitarist, to quickly and easily specify the speed of the drumbeat that they are playing along with.

With the meat and potatoes of the project already figured out, the next part was to make the speed of the bike trigger the tempo of the drum beat. For the signal input, a magnet mounted on the wheel triggers a reed switch mounted on the bike fork once per wheel revolution. This is the same method of information gathering that a bicycle speedometer/odometer uses.

The business part of this project includes an Arduino that measures the speed of the wheel via the magnetic switch, adjusts the speed of the drum beat, and then sends the drum beat to a synthesizer via MIDI protocol. The synthesizer converts the MIDI signal into drum sounds amplified through a powered speaker that the rider can hear. The entire system is powered by a 9v battery and housed in a project box strapped to the bike’s handlebars.

All of the design files and Arduino code are available via [Serdef’s] excellent write up on hackaday.io in case you’re interested in making one for yourself.

Open Source Electric Car, CarBEN, Produces No Carbon

June 11, 2014 by Rich Bremer 74 Comments

Raise your hand if you have designed and built a full size car…. Nobody? Doing so would be a huge task considering car manufactures have thousands of people involved with designing and building a car model. Eager beaver [Neil] has stepped up and taken on that challenge. He’s started an open source project he’s calling the CarBEN.

The plan is for the car to hold 5 people comfortably while being just a tad larger than a Scion xA. The body is made of foam and will be covered with fiberglass. The car is designed in a shape that tapers in towards the rear of the car and has features like a smooth underside and covered wheels to create a low coefficient of drag. The goal is for this beauty to get 300-400 miles per charge with an Miles Per Gallon Equivalent of over 224.

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A Head Unit Docking Station

June 9, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

dock

[Ivan] had a simple idea: being able to control his Android device from the small keypad on his car’s steering column. This would allow him to cycle through apps, navigation, and audio tracks while never taking his hands off the wheel. Feature creep then set in and [Ivan] asked himself how he could charge his phone through the same interface. What he ended up with is a head unit that’s also a dock.

While [Ivan]’s steering wheel doesn’t have the nice integrated remote control buttons found in newer cars, he does have a Blaupunkt remote, a small, clip-on controller that has a an IR transmitter on it. The IR receiver was connected to a PIC microcontroller, sending commands to the phone for up, down, left, right, menu, and home. Audio output from the phone is handled by a small USB sound card connected to a USB hub, sending the audio signals directly into the head unit’s amplifier.

Having the phone charge while it’s still in USB host mode is the crucial part of this build; not being able to charge on a long car ride would quickly drain the battery and make a car dock kind of pointless. To accomplish this, [Ivan] simulated a Galaxy S4 dock with a few resistors in the USB port, allowing the phone to control the USB sound card, listen to the emulated keyboard and mouse, and charge at the same time.

It’s not a pretty build, but it is extraordinarily useful. In the videos you can see that [Ivan] pretty much pulled this build together from stuff he had sitting around – a great reuse of junk, and a great addition to his car at the same time.

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Three-Phase Submersible Thruster Is Open Source And Awesome

June 7, 2014 by James Hobson 25 Comments

submerged_mellon_assembly_v8

Have you ever considered building some kind of underwater vehicle? It’s rather ambitious but [Dane] of Transistor-Man has designed and built a working submersible 3-phase electric thruster — and he’s released the plans online for all to share!

He decided to make this for his 3D printed canoe (another awesome project) which is possible due to his massive SCARA robot 3D printer. The thruster makes use of readily available off the shelf components, but with 3D printed cones for decreased water resistance and other manufactured parts. The housing is water-jet cut, and the poly-carbonate tube had grooves for seals made using a lathe. The amount of detail in his build logs is incredible — he’s fully modeled all parts in what looks like SolidWorks and uploaded detailed images and designs of all the parts.

The trickiest part of the build was making it water-tight. His first test was to submerge it in a water bath for 8 minutes, and once that was proven, he filled the inside with 5W-20 oil to make sure it wouldn’t leak the other way as well. One of his project goals is for this thruster to work 1 meter underwater without losing more than 10ml of the coolant (oil) per hour.

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A Bicycle Built For One

June 6, 2014 by Adam Fabio 16 Comments

diyBike

[Bcmanucd] must have been vying for husband of the year when he set out to build his wife a custom time trials bicycle. We’re not just talking about bolting together a few parts either – he designed, cut, welded, and painted the entire frame from scratch. Time trial racing is a very specific form of bicycle racing. Bikes are built for speed, but drafting is not allowed, so aerodynamics of the bike and rider become key. Custom bikes cost many thousands of dollars, but as poor college students, neither [Bcmanucd] nor his wife could afford a proper bike. Thus the bicycle project was born.

[Bcmanucd] created the basic geometry on a fit assessment provided by his wife’s cycling coach. He designed the entire bike in Autodesk Inventor. Once the design was complete, it was time to order materials. 7005 aluminum alloy was chosen because it wouldn’t require solution heat treating, just a trip to the oven to relieve welding stresses. Every tube utilized a unique cross section to reduce drag, so [Bcmanucd] had to order his raw material from specialty bike suppliers.

Once all the material was in, [Bcmanucd] put his mechanical engineering degree aside and put on his work gloves. Like all students, he had access to the UC Davis machine shop. He used the shop’s CNC modified Bridgeport mill to cut the head tube and dropouts.

The most delicate part of the process is aligning all the parts and welding. Not a problem for [Bcmanucd], as he used a laser table and his own jigs to keep everything lined up perfectly. Any welder will tell you that working with aluminum takes some experience. Since this was [Bcmanucd’s] first major aluminum project, he ran several tests on scrap metal to ensure he had the right setup on his TIG welder. The welds cleaned up nicely and proved to be strong.

The entire build took about 3 months, which was just in time for the first race of the season. In fact, during the first few races the bike wasn’t even painted yet. [Bcmanucd’s] wife didn’t seem to mind though, as she rode it to win the woman’s team time trial national championships that year. The bike went on to become a “rolling resume” for [Bcmanucd], and helped him land his dream job in the bicycle industry.

Echoing the top comment over on [Bcmanucd’s] Reddit thread, we’d like to say awesome job — but slow down, you’re making all us lazy spouses look bad!