Wetlev 2 Water Jet Pack Marginally Less Lethal Than Prior Version

June 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

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You’ve got to admit the thought of tooling around the lake on your own personal water jetpack is a seductive proposition. This is the second summer in which [Toby Gardner] has been trying to work out the kinks on his build. Last year he got out of the water, but the jetpack was pretty hard to control. Over the winter he redesigned the nozzles of the water jets and they seem to be doing quite a bit better.

The fact that the build will be in frequent contact with water makes it a bit harder. They need to have parts that won’t corrode but can stand up to the pressure. Stainless steel was the obvious choice, and for the refinements they were able to get quite a few off the shelf parts to start from. He built a mold for forming the backpack and took it out for a spin. We don’t get a great look at the new version from afar. But watch the videos below and you’ll see last year it tried to drown him, this year it seems to float.

Why is he building rather than buying? Have you seen the price of the original version?

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Raspberry Pi Replaces A Volvo Nav System

June 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Reinis] has a Volvo S80. One of the dashboard features it includes is a 6.5″ LCD screen which periscopes up to use as a navigation system. The problem is that Volvo stopped making maps for it around five years ago and there are no maps at all for Latvia where he lives. So it’s worthless… to you’re average driver. But [Reinis] is fixing it on his own by replacing the system with a Raspberry Pi.

That link leads to his project overview page. But he’s already posted follow-ups on hardware design and initial testing. He’s basing the design around a Raspberry Pi board, but that doesn’t have all the hardware it needs to communicate with the car’s systems. For this he designed his own shield that uses an ATmega328 along with a CAN controller and CAN transceiver. The latter two chips patch into the CAN bus on the car’s On Board Diagnostic system. We didn’t see much about the wiring, but the overview post mentions that the screen takes RGB or Composite inputs so he must be running a composite video cable from the trunk to the dashboard.

No Space In The Garage? Build A Lamborghini In The Basement

June 8, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

It took 17 years, but [Ken Imhoff] finally got the car of his dreams. This isn’t a, ‘go down to the dealership’ situation. No, [Ken] built a Lamborghini Countach by himself in his basement.

The build process started off by fabricating a wooden frame to which hand-crafted aluminum panels were attached. The frame of the car was welded out of tubular steel, and slowly, over the course of 17 years, a custom Lamborghini Countach took shape.

When the car was complete, there was one problem left to solve – how do you get a car out of a basement? Rent a backhoe and knock out a wall, of course. Replacing a few cinder blocks in a properly reinforced wall is a lot easier than cutting a Lambo chassis in half, it seems.

It’s an amazing piece of artistry that is a testament to [Ken]’s skill in metalworking, welding, and pretty much any other skill we can think of.

Ask Hackaday: How Are These Thieves Exploiting Automotive Keyless Entry?

June 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 368 Comments

A new attack on automotive keyless entry systems is making headlines and we want to know how you think it’s being done. The Today Show reports that vehicles of different makes and models are being broken into using keyless entry on the passenger’s side of the car. It sounds like thieves steal items found inside rather than the vehicles themselves which makes these crimes distinctly different from the keyless ignition thefts of a year ago.

So how are they doing this? Here are the clues: The thieves have been filmed entering only the passenger side of the car. They hold a small device in their hand to unlock the doors and disable the alarm. And there is evidence that it doesn’t work on 100% of vehicles they try. Could it be some hidden manufacturer code reset? Has an encryption algorithm been hacked to sniff the keyfob identifier at a previous time? Or do you think we’re completely off track? Let us know your opinion by leaving a comment.

[Thanks Mom]

Ship Building In Volgograd

June 4, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

I don’t know if you’d consider this handmade. I don’t know if you’d consider this skilled. I do know you should stop thinking about those things and just watch this stunning video. Molten metal, grungy environments, and hard work are presented here in a fascinating look at how ships are built in Volgograd.

A Black Box For A Motorcycle

June 2, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

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[Lukusz] has a new motorcycle – a Yamaha XJ6SA – and since it hasn’t been in an accident yet, he thought building a black box to record telemetry from the last 30 minutes of riding would be a good idea. While the project isn’t complete yet, he’s already reading data coming straight from the engine control unit.

After figuring out most of the pinout for his bike’s ECU connector, [Lukasz] found one wire that didn’t actually do anything. This was his ECU’s K line, a serial output that is able to relay the state of the gauges to external devices. The electronic spec of the K line is a bit weird, though, but luckily after finding a chip to convert the signal into something a logic analyzer can understand.

With a logic analyzer connected to the K line – and setting it to receive on at 16064 baud – [Lukasz] was able to get a whole lot of data directly from his bike. In the future he plans to pass data such as speed, indicator lights, RPMs, and the current gear to a Raspberry Pi for logging.

18-year-old Builds Functioning Submarine

May 30, 2013 by Mike Szczys 92 Comments

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[Justin Beckerman] built a functioning one-man submarine. The thing is, this isn’t the first one that he’s built. Looking through the projects on his website we find almost no information about this build, but he does show off one previous model, as well as a couple of unmanned underwater rover projects.

The pressure hull of the sub is made from corrugated drainage pipe. This isn’t a bad idea as the tube is engineered to be buried in the ground and carry the load of earth on top of it. It’s designed to go down just 30 feet, which explains the lack of half-dome caps on either end; the pressure just isn’t that great at that depth. The buoy floating to his left is his tether to the surface. Fresh air is pumped from here into the sub. He’s also included safety features like a 20-minute air tank in case he gets into a bind, and a quick opening top hatch. That hatch is a hemisphere of clear acrylic which lets him view what’s around him.

You’ll learn more from the two video clips he posted. The Fox 5 news interview includes a shot of one of the messiest work benches we’ve seen. A messy bench is the sign of constant project construction, right?

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