VW has been shipping their cars to the US with small solar panels inside to keep the batteries from going dead during shipment. Dick Streefland picked one up and added a small monitor circuit to monitor and charge his battery. Batwatch is based on the Atmel ATtiny13V and measures the voltage on two sides of a resister to determine the voltage of the battery while the solar panel is charging the system.
[Firoz Ahammad] added 5 ultra bright LEDs to his motorcycle helmet. It uses a Maxim wireless tx/rx pair and is powered by 3 rechargeable batteries. He spaced the LEDs evenly across the thickest area of the helmet. I personally wouldn’t mod my safety equipment or I’d at least put the LEDs in preexisting vent holes.
[Ian] built this headlight for his commuter bike. It is based around the Luxeon Star LED which is supposed to be equivalent to a 5W halogen. He mounted it to an aluminum frame and used a Fraen narrow lens. It’s powered by a pack of 4 rechargeable AA batteries. He’s got a list of improvements he would make. The first one is a better casing since his looks terrible compared to Suzy Jackson’s sexy light.
I found this self-balancing unicycle via Trevor Blackwell’s site. Dr. Hofer’s self-balancing unicycle uses a wide tire for lateral stability. Trevor had spent several months learning how to ride a unicycle before building his; the large tire makes the learning curve for this one a lot less severe. The project site is in German, but I found one write-up in English. The majority of it is dedicated to the control scheme. It is very difficult to model the unicycle as an inverse pendulum due to so many unknowns. Dr. Hofer’s team used fuzzy control instead which let them apply several layers of rules without requiring a lot of previous knowledge. Here’s a photo gallery of the device.
[sean] reminded me that I forgot to include the obligatory link to Bombardier’s Embrio concept.
I’m sure most people that have built a CarPC are already familiar with shutdown controllers, but I think this hack is pretty clever. Computers don’t like being turned off suddenly so you need to figure out how to power down the PC safely. This circuit has a serial connector and appears to XP as a generic UPS. When the ignition is turned off it breaks the 5V line to COM pin 8. XP responds by hibernating. Once the computer shuts down the relay for the power inverter opens. When the ignition is switched on the inverter powers up and the computer turns on.
[thanks SilverPill]
Here’s a hack that’s been around since the very start of the hot rod movement. Car exhaust flame throwers work by interrupting the spark to the engine. This dumps raw fuel into the exhaust system. The fuel is ignited by a coil and spark plug placed right before the exhaust tip. Doing this will shorten the life of your engine (and pedestrians). The raw fuel strips the oil off the cylinder walls and contaminates the oil causing more wear and tear. Also, this mod can’t be used on a fuel injected car. It would foul the O2 sensors and catalytic converter. Never the less, our fascination with electricity will live on.
[thanks matticus66]
Meghan Desai and Yiling Li built this radio controlled car telemetry system for their “Designing with microcontrollers” class. They had looked at several other RC projects and decided it would save a lot of trouble if they didn’t attempt to work with the car’s on-board microcontroller. They built separate boards to house the four IR sensing pairs, temperature sensors, accelerometer, and an Atmel Mega32. All of the collected data is transmitted at 433MHz. On the receiving end is another Mega32 that processes the data and formats it for display on a TV. They’ve done an excellent job documenting their project.
If you have to do a design project this semester, we’d love to see it. Just get some free hosting from Blogger and post your project. I’m using Blogger as an example since they don’t crash and burn when we link to them.
