A blueish grey plastic enclosure sits next to a blue and black servo, silver Li-ion battery, a GPS module board, an LCD, a small metal lever, and ESP32S3 board.

Pedal Harder For Affordability

September 21, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 46 Comments

In the US, among other places, housing costs are skyrocketing. It can sometimes be difficult to get a feel for the scale of the issue and how it hits neighborhoods differently. [Justin Blinder] has designed a device to help people get a more visceral understanding of the problem.

In New York City, Citi Bikes are everywhere in the city’s transportation landscape. [Blinder] used a GPS module plugged into an ESP32S3 to vary the amount of resistance on one of these bikes by actuating the front brake with a servo. As a rider takes the bike through different neighborhoods, the resistance varies in proportion to the rent burden experienced there.

[Blinder] explains, “One of the main technical challenges was calibrating this relationship so that the changes were physically noticeable without feeling abrupt or unsafe.” As rent burden is merely the percentage of income taken up by rent in an area (by the block in this dataset), it is only one indicator of the additional friction a family might feel in an area, but a useful one to at least begin to convey the disparities in the urban environment. We really like how this connects abstract statistics to something more experiential.

If you’re looking for some other bike hacks, how about wireless brakes or a sleeper e-bike with a solenoid display?

via Next City

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A man in white and black railroad overalls rides a short one wheel platform suspended between two rail wheels on a steel axle.

Ride The Rails On A OneWheel

September 16, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 26 Comments

The US has tons of abandoned rail, especially in urban environments, so it seems a shame to let it go to waste. [OneWheel] decided to modify one of their boards to ride the rail behind their office.

The stock OneWheel frame was sectioned and CNC cut mounts were placed in the center to raise the motor above the deck. Steel rail wheels sourced from eBay were then attached to an axle run through where the original wheel was mounted in the center. The motor housing was turned down on a lathe for better clearance, and then a bike sprocket was attached to chain drive the train axle.

While not everyone has a hydraulic press and a CNC for that professional look, we don’t see any reason you couldn’t bodge something similar together at home. Be sure to watch [Bradley Gawthrop]’s Supercon talk on the Personal Electric Vehicle Revolution for some ideas on what you need to get started.

Dream of riding the rails yourself? You should checkout this tiny rail riding pod car or this more minimalist example. Definitely make sure you’re riding on a truly abandoned line or get a rail warrant though!

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Rusting An E-scooter (In A Good Way)

September 13, 2026 by Al Williams 4 Comments

It is a classic Hackaday situation. You have an Egret GT E-scooter. It has a screen that shows the usual dash stats, but that led to an annoyance. You could accidentally enter firmware update mode and, from there, enter operational mode without the security PIN. [Ben] couldn’t let that stand, so he reverse-engineered the protocol and rewrote the firmware in Rust. As he put it, “… because I have to break… everything I own…” We get it.

The mobile app was useful for some basic info, since sniffing Bluetooth is fairly easy and analyzing mobile code is, more or less, straightforward. Analysis revealed some data that doesn’t show on the display and that several things are sent back to home base tagged with the scooter’s unique ID — another reason to gut the existing firmware.

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The Helicopter With Radioactive Blades

September 7, 2026 by Adam Fabio 32 Comments

Sometimes you find gold in unexpected places. In this case, it’s from a video about the CH-53 helicopter. The CH-53 Sea Stallion first entered service in 1966. It’s a huge helicopter, capable of lifting immense amounts of weight. All that weight hangs from 6 (or 7 on some models) rotor blades. The problem was detecting problems with the blades before they grew into a catastrophic failure.

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Fat Tire Brakes Get Wireless Upgrade

August 29, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 51 Comments

At first glance, wireless brakes seem like a recipe for disaster. For something as critical as braking, many bicyclists might prefer a physical connection to their method of safely controlling speed. But there are a number of surprising benefits of electronic or wireless braking systems. For one, they can enable systems like anti-lock braking systems and for another they can eliminate cabling or hydraulics on a bicycle. For these reasons, and just for the thrill of it, [Berm Peak] built a set of wireless brakes for his fat tire bicycle to test out the possibilities.

The system uses a set of ESP32 microcontrollers to handle inputs from the braking lever and outputs to the front and rear brakes, as well as a central control unit and display. The brakes themselves are controlled by actuators from car door locks, which when combined with the springs from the stock calipers work to apply a wide range of braking force to the wheels. These did take a bit of prototyping to get working right, by changing to higher quality calipers, increasing the angle of the actuator, and adding longer levers, but eventually a working braking system started to appear.

But replacing a hydraulic system with an electronic one isn’t where something like this shines. [Berm Peak] was able to add in a number of features impossible in traditional braking systems. Not only does this have an ABS system and the possibility to remotely slow down his children’s bikes when they’re riding, but there’s also a braking equalizer that allows the rider to control how much braking there is at certain positions of the brake lever, and another setting called “derp” which doesn’t engage the brakes at all until a certain threshold has passed. This might end up being the next big trend in mountain biking, unlike airless tires.

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Rooftop Camper For Roofless Vehicle

August 27, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 52 Comments

The Honda Goldwing is one of the more famous motorcycles ever produced. It’s known for its reliability and comfort, but also for being one of the first motorcycles Honda rolls out new technology with. It was the first to have a factory-installed airbag as well as integrated GPS, and is now largely associated for being a sort of two-wheeled RV with how many creature comforts it supports for long-distance riders. [Matt] has a Goldwing of his own, and is taking that RV-like feeling to the extreme with a rooftop camper for this motorcycle.

Of course, motorcycles don’t have roofs, but if this Goldwing had one this camper would definitely be above that. Goldwings are already heavy enough without an enormous weight dramatically increasing the center of gravity, and [Matt] certainly had his problems with that along the way. But before this adventure he had modified it into a hill climber, removing a lot of the extraneous equipment from it. Attaching some metal frame and a lightweight camper shell to it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch from there, so he got to work with a welder. At the end he has a box that’s just barely big enough for him to sleep in but is more or less functional as a camper.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, [Matt] dropped this more than once on its maiden voyage, and one of those falls damaged a wiring harness that caused his battery to drain in the night. Luckily he was not too far from home on the test drive. We’d tend to think that this camper won’t be one that [Matt] keeps working on (although we’d imagine a tricycle kit might solve his center of gravity issues) but since he’s built some other interesting campers in the past we’re not too sure we’d count this one out just yet.

3D Printing A Railway Pump Car

August 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

It's arguably adult-sized. (Credit: Sam Barker, YouTube) — It’s arguably adult-sized. (Credit: Sam Barker, YouTube)

A staple of old movies featuring railways, many handcars – also called pump trolleys or pump cars – feature the characteristic seesawing beam. Requiring at least two people, the motion of this beam is subsequently converted into the rotating motion of the wheels, propelling it at a leisurely pace across the tracks. As a fun and yet functional mechanical contraption it also makes for an entertaining 3D printable project, which is what [Sam Barker] and [Tom] did.

You can find the entire project over at Printables if you are feeling the itch as well, though as of writing details on the required bolts and shafts are still pending.

Since the entire assembly had to be lugged over to the Open Sauce event in the US, they had to design it to be small enough to fit into check-in luggage and easy enough to reassemble in a hotel room. Naturally this put some constraints on the full size of the contraption, with it omitting compatibility with standard gauge railways and also being decidedly fun-sized.

That said, it seems to have left an impression on the folk over at Open Sauce, and it’s hard to argue with the sheer fun factor of such a co-op mode of transportation. Even if bicycle-style handcars are more popular these days, especially for tourist purposes, the old seesaw-style has that certain charm to it.

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