Climbing Bike Storage Thwarts Thieves?

November 29, 2010 by Mike Szczys 51 Comments

If you’ve got an expensive bike and don’t mind carrying around a whole bunch of extra weight in your courier bag you’ll like this concept. A design team built a pole-climbing bike rack in about 14 days. The video after the break shows the prototyping process as well as the finished “lock” in use. It’s a commercial for the company that employs the designers, but this is one kind of advert we don’t mind watching.

Square channel makes up the body of the device, with a set of Rollerblade wheels which grab a light pole and use three 12V gear motors for climbing. The controller is a wireless fob similar to those used for keyless entry on cars. In the video you can hear the cliché sound of a car alarm being set once the carrier reaches its finished height. Nice.

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Gear Indicator For Suzuki Motorcycle

November 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

This little board serves as a current gear indicator for a motorcycle. It was designed with the Suzuki V-Storm motorcycles in mind as they have a sensor built into the gearbox. Other gear indicators rely on sensors on the shifters themselves, but reading the voltage level from a gearbox sensor gives much more reliable information.

The voltage measurement is handled by an ATmega88 microcontroller which in turn drives the 8×8 LED display. Also built into the system is a temperature sensor and photoresistor. The firmware takes advantage of both of these inputs, displaying temperature when in sixth gear or at the push of a button, and dimming the display based on ambient light. There are also settings for screen rotation, and user preferences.

We didn’t find schematics or software but this should be pretty easy to replicate. If you need a primer for AVR programming we’ve got you covered.

[Thanks Michal]

In-button Display For Your Car’s Dashboard

November 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Here’s an interesting take on augmenting a car’s dashboard. [Daniel] is using a button blank to house a 1″ OLED display in his Jetta. It shows auxiliary data such as boost pressure and several sets of temperature readings. The display itself has a tiny little circuit board with a PIC 24 to drive it. A larger board, seen above, collects the temperature data from some sensors that [Daniel] added as part of the hack. There are some pictures of the installed display inside of the dark car and it looks really easy to read. It also sounds like there’s some dimming functionality built into the firmware. This is the easiest way we’ve seen to add a display to your dashboard as it just requires you to pop out a button blank, rather than disassembling the entire console or patching into what’s already there.

Building A Wooden Vespa

November 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Scooter fans should start sharpening their chisels if they want to undertake this project. This Vespa is the work of a master carpenter and a lot of time. Through the build log photos you can see that it all started with a frame made by bending and laminating wood layers together. Veneer adds the stylish stripe and a lot of carving and turning brings the curves associated with the classic scooters. Even the hand grips, brake handles, and saddle are made out of wood. There’s springs for some shock absorption but we’d bet you don’t want to ride this for too long, or park it outside. Now it just needs an electric motor retrofit.

[Thanks Blair]

Swapping Speedometer Needle For LEDs

November 8, 2010 by Mike Szczys 44 Comments

[Ah2002] didn’t like the shaky needle in his car’s speedometer so he replaced it with a ring of LEDs. The old speedometer had a cable which rotated along with the gearbox for mechanical speed measurement. By connecting the stepper motor from a printer instead of this cable, a voltage is generated that fluctuates with the speed of the car. The fluctuation is linear so a given voltage measurement can be directly associated with one particular speed. By using a trimpot to calibrate the input voltage, [Ah2002] connected the signal to an LM3914 dot/bar display driver. These can be chained together, lighting a string of outputs based on the single voltage input. The result is the board seen above, which was covered with a printed paper graph in the final assembly.

Judging from the video after the break, we’d bet there was some distracted driving during the calibration process. The driver appears to be holding the video recorder, and since a cellphone GPS was used during calibration we wonder if [Ah2002] was adjusting the trimpot, looking at the GPS, and driving all at once. It’s a fairly awesome hack, but do be careful when you’re working on something like this.

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Shiny Motorcycle Computer

October 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

We’re rather surprised at how popular it has become to build your own motorcycle computer. [Mario Mauerer] tipped us off about his shiny motorcycle computer (translated) for his Yamaha XTZ 750. It uses an ATmega644 microcontroller to pull a variety of data together and display it on this white LED backlit display. He connected a flow meter to the fuel line to monitor gas consumption. Oil temperature is captured by inserting a brass tube (containing the sensor) through a hole in the oil cap and soldering it in place. Water temperature is gathered by measuring the external temperature of one of the cooling lines. [Mario] uses a rotary encode with a click function as the control interface device, and a battery backed real time clock keeps time.

A quick look at the PCBs tells the tale of good circuit design. But we do wonder about catching the reflection of the sun in that shiny bezel.

Self-balancing Unicycle 2.0

October 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

Focus Designs has a new version of their self-balancing unicycle for sale. This improves upon their original design in several ways. The battery pack has moved to LiFePO4, which is becoming more common in electric transportation. There’s also regenerative braking and fall protection which kills the motor when you fall off.

We’ve embedded their marketing video after the break. Our favorite part is the shot seen above: a guy on the unicycle cruising along next to a woman who is running. There’s nothing like sitting on your bum while some else exercises.

At any rate, from what we see in the video they’ve turned out a solid product.

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