This one’s pretty simple, but anyone who’s ever spent time tweaking an engine will appreciate it. [Kevin]’s been using a wiimote to measure the acceleration of his car. He put together a script to dump the accelerometer output to a CSV file, then graphed it with Excel. He notes that the accelerometer output isn’t that precise, but it’s good enough to give you feedback on your mods.
Transportation Hacks1657 Articles
Off The Wall: Motorcycling Around The World
Not normally our thing, but holy crap this is just awesome. This map is the approximate journey of [Makiko Sugino] – so far. She’s been riding a Yamaha 250 all over the world, and she’s still going. Check out this thread for some awesome pics and details.
AVR Modified EV Charger
[Gary]’s built some nice AVR projects. The most interesting is the charge controller/monitor he built for his EV Porsche. Each board controls a charger – with one charger per battery. When the system isn’t charging the batteries, it provides real-time data to a VFD display in the dashboard of the 1978 Porsche 924. Hopefully he’ll notice the spike in traffic and will update the charger project page.
Human Electric Trike Project
While I’m waiting for my last stepper motor, I’ve been pondering my electric motorcycle build. While eyeballing batteries, I ran across a really impressive human/electric recumbent bike project. [Bob Dold] built this for his M.S.M.E. Thesis project. The frame was built from bonded aluminum. The flat parts were cut via waterjet service, and the rest were machined by the college’s machine shop. The 1000w motor (and controller) came from a Schwinn X1000 electric scooter. Looks like a four link suspension (plus steering and shock linkages). Interestingly, he’s using some USB data loggers for voltage and current(with a shunt) and combining it with GPS data to track real world performance.
Balancing One Wheel Scooter
Fresh off the tip line, [Ben] sent in his one wheeled balancing scooter. It’s a nice simple design – I just might have to build one myself. The steel frame surrounds a pair of 12V 12Ah SLA batteries, a 400w 24v DC motor, one of the ever handy OSMC motor controllers, rate gyro, accelerometer and a PIC 16F876A. I love the entire concept! (For some reason, I’m thinking it needs a brake light on the rear…
Check out the video after the cut. He walks through the hardware at the end.
By the way, Eliot and I’ll be at Shmoocon in a couple of weeks. We won’t have boards from the Design Challenge yet, but we should have something to give away to people who find us there.
DIY Electric Car Heater
[lgtngstk] was tired of driving his cold Honda Civic to work. He built an instant on electric heater for his car from a toaster and an ATX power supply. The toaster elements were mounted to one half of the case, while the fan was left in it’s stock location.To get the fan blowing hard enough, he whipped up a DC voltage doubling circuit. To finish it out, he added relay control and plenty of new holes in the case.
O2 Sensor Simulator
[Bob Blick] built this simulator from a 555 and few other common parts. Just when I thought I’d seen all the uses for the 555. The oxygen sensor on a cars exhaust is used to determine how efficiently the fuel mixture is to an engine. These can be a real pain to replace, so it can be helpful to fake the signal to the ECU.
