[Justin N] sent in one of his projects. It’s a digital dashboard gauge for his Subaru. It’s built around an arduino board with a text LCD and standard automotive senders. He’s using it to monitor oil temp, turbo pressure, temperature, acceleration and provide a lap timing. The details are buried in this forum thread, but its worth a look if you’ve spent time geeking out on your car.
Transportation Hacks1701 Articles
CCCamp 2007: Quad-copters
R/C quad-copters have been quite popular at CCCamp. Our friend, Dan Kaminsky shot this video of two different models in flight. The first is a 10K Euro commercial version, but the second one is a 500 Euro home built one. The commercial unit has a head mounted display so you can fly it from the onboard camera. There is a second video after the break that shows the maneuverability.
Wiimote Car Accelerometer
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.
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.
