Transportation Hacks

1499 Articles

British Trains To (Maybe) Make Way For Steam Once More

July 6, 2024 by 72 Comments

There’s nothing more guaranteed to excite a grizzled old railway enthusiast than the sight of a steam locomotive. The original main-line rail propulsion technology still clings on in a few places, but for practical purposes, it disappeared a lifetime ago. It’s interesting then to hear of a brand new steam locomotive prototype being considered for revenue freight use on British metals. Is it yet another rebuild of a heritage design to be used for enthusiasts only? No, it’s an entirely new design with nothing in common with the locomotives of the past, as [Terrier55Stepney] tells us in the video below the break.

Gone is the huge boiler and reciprocating pistons of old, as indeed is the notion of boiling anything. Instead, this is a steam turbine, nothing like the 1920s and 30s experiments with conventional locomotives, nor even the Union Pacific’s oil-fired condensing turbo-electrics. The new idea here from the British company Steamology is to create steam directly from the combustion of hydrogen in a series of small modular steam generators, and the resulting prototype turbo-generator will replace the diesel engine in a redundant British Rail class 60 freight locomotive. It’s unclear whether it will incorporate a condenser, but since it has no need to retain the water for a boiler we’re not sure it would need one.

Prototype locomotives featuring new technologies have a long and inglorious history of not making the grade, so while this is definitely an exciting and interesting development we’re not guaranteed to see it in widespread use. But it could offer a way to ensure a low-carbon replacement for diesel heavy freight locomotives, and unexpectedly provide engine upgrades for existing classes. The fact it’s technically a steam locomotive is incidental.

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Full-Scale Flying DeLorean Gets Closer To Liftoff

July 6, 2024 by 11 Comments

These days, even hobbyist multi-rotor aircraft are capable of carrying considerable payloads. For example, the test rig that [Brian Brocken] recently put together should be able to loft more than 80 pounds (36 kilograms) without breaking a sweat. That would be a whole lot of camera gear or other equipment, but in this case, he’s planning on carrying something a bit more interesting: a full-scale foam DeLorean.

We first covered this project in December of last year, when [Brian] started using a massive robotic arm to carefully cut the body and individual parts of the car out of expanded polystyrene foam. He estimated at the time the body should weigh in at less than 30 lbs (14 kg), so he’d need to build a quadcopter with a maximum lift of roughly twice that much to keep the performance where he wanted it.

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A Look Back At The USSR’s Mi-6 Helicopter Airliner

July 5, 2024 by 26 Comments

Most of us would equate commercial airline travel with fixed-wing aircraft, but civilian transport by helicopter, especially in large and sparsely populated regions, is common enough. It was once even big business in the Soviet Union, where the Aeroflot airline operated passenger helicopters in regular service for many decades. In the mid-1960s they even started work on converting the Mil Mi-6 — the USSR’s largest and fastest helicopter — to carry paying passengers. Unfortunately this never got past a single prototype, with the circumstances described by [Oliver Parken] in a recent article.

This passenger version of the Mi-6 got the designation Mi-6P (for passazhirskyi, meaning passenger) and would have seated up to 80 (3 + 2 row configuration), compared to the Mi-8 passenger variant that carried 28 – 31 passengers. Why exactly the Mi-6P never got past the prototype stage is unknown, but its successor in the form of the Mi-26P has a listed passenger variant and features. Both have a cruising speed of around 250 km/h, with a top of 300 km/h. The auxiliary winglets of the Mi-6 provided additional lift during flight, and the weight lifting record set by the Mi-6 was only broken by the Mi-26 in 1982.

An obvious disadvantage of passenger helicopters is that they are more complicated to operate and maintain, while small fixed wing airliners like the ATR 72 (introduced in 1988) can carry about as many passengers, requires just a strip of tarmac to land and take off from, travel about twice as fast as an Mi-6P would, and do not require two helicopter pilots to fly them. Unless the ability to hover and land or take-off vertically are required, this pretty much explains why passenger helicopters are such a niche application. Not that the Mi-6P doesn’t have that certain je ne sais quoi to it, mind.

Powering Airplanes With Microwaves: An Aviation Physics Challenge Amidst Many

June 27, 2024 by 19 Comments

Falling firmly under the fascinating science category of ‘What if…?’ comes the idea of powering airplanes with beamed microwaves. Although the idea isn’t crazy by itself, since we can even keep airplanes flying using just solar power (though with no real useful payload), running through the numbers as [Ian McKay] does in a recent article in IEEE Spectrum makes it clear that there are still some major hurdles if we want to make such a technology reality. Yet is beamed microwave power that much more far out than other alternative ways to power aviation?

Most of the issues are rather hard limits with the assumed technology (phased microwave arrays), with the need for 170 meter diameter ground transmitters every 100 km along the route (including floating transmitters on the oceans with massive power cables, apparently). Due to the limited surface area on something like a Boeing 737-800 you’d need to cram the full take-off power needs (~30 MW) on its ~1,000 m2 surface area available for receiver elements, or 150 Watt per rectifying antenna (rectenna) element assuming a wavelength of 5 cm.

The good news is that the passengers inside would probably survive if the microwave-like shielding keeps up, and birds passing through the beams are likely to survive if they’re fast enough. It’d ruin a whole part of the local radio spectrum from leaked microwaves, of course. Unfortunately beaming MW levels of microwaves across 100 km is still beyond our capabilities.

After this fun science session, [Ian] then looks at alternatives like batteries and hydrogen, neither of which come even close to the energy density (or relative safety) of commercial aviation fuels. Perhaps synthetic aviation fuel might be the ticket, but at this point beamed microwave power is as likely to replace aviation fuel as batteries or hydrogen, though more likely than countries like the United States building out a fast & cheap high-speed rail network.

BikeBeamer Adds POV Display To Bicycle Wheels

June 11, 2024 by 16 Comments

Unless you’re living in a bicycle paradise like the Netherlands, most people will choose to add some sort of illumination to their bicycle to help drivers take note that there’s something other than a car using the road. Generally, simple flashing LEDs for both the front and the rear is a pretty good start, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more lights to the bicycle or increase their brightness. On the other hand, if you want to add some style to your bicycle lighting system then this persistence of vision (POV) display called the BikeBeamer from [locxter] might be just the thing.

The display uses four LED strips, each housed in their own 3D printed case which are installed at 90-degree angles from one another in between the spokes of a standard bicycle wheel. An ESP32 sits at the base of one of the strips and is responsible for storing the image and directing the four displays. This is a little more complex than a standard POV display as it’s also capable of keeping up with the changing rotational speeds of the bicycle wheels when in use. The design also incorporates batteries so that no wires need to route from the bike frame to the spinning wheels.

This is an ongoing project for [locxter] as well, meaning that there are some planned upgrades even to this model that should be in the pipe for the future. Improving the efficiency of the code will hopefully allow for more complex images and even animations to be displayed in the future, and there are also some plans to improve the PCB as well with all surface-mount components. There are a few other ways to upgrade your bike’s lighting as well, and we could recommend this heads-up headlight display to get started.

AI Kayak Controller Lets The Paddle Show The Way

June 10, 2024 by 6 Comments

Controlling an e-bike is pretty straightforward. If you want to just let it rip, it’s a no-brainer — or rather, a one-thumber, as a thumb throttle is the way to go. Or, if you’re still looking for a bit of the experience of riding a bike, sensing when the pedals are turning and giving the rider a boost with the motor is a good option.

But what if your e-conveyance is more of the aquatic variety? That’s an interface design problem of a different color, as [Braden Sunwold] has discovered with his DIY e-kayak. We’ve detailed his work on this already, but for a short recap, his goal is to create an electric assist for his inflatable kayak, to give you a boost when you need it without taking away from the experience of kayaking. To that end, he used the motor and propeller from a hydrofoil to provide the needed thrust, while puzzling through the problem of building an unobtrusive yet flexible controller for the motor.

His answer is to mount an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in a waterproof container that can clamp to the kayak paddle. The controller is battery-powered and uses an nRF link to talk to a Raspberry Pi in the kayak’s waterproof electronics box. The sensor also has an LED ring light to provide feedback to the pilot. The controller is set up to support both a manual mode, which just turns on the motor and turns the kayak into a (low) power boat, and an automatic mode, which detects when the pilot is paddling and provides a little thrust in the desired direction of travel.

The video below shows the non-trivial amount of effort [Braden] and his project partner [Jordan] put into making the waterproof enclosure for the controller. The clamp is particularly interesting, especially since it has to keep the sensor properly oriented on the paddle. [Braden] is working on a machine-learning method to analyze paddle motions to discern what the pilot is doing and where the kayak goes. Once he has that model built, it should be time to hit the water and see what this thing can do. We’re eager to see the results.
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Reverse Engineering Keeps Early Ford EVs Rolling

June 7, 2024 by 5 Comments

With all the EV hype in the air, you’d be forgiven for thinking electric vehicles are something new. But of course, EVs go way, way back, to the early 19th century by some reckonings. More recently but still pretty old-school were Ford’s Think line of NEVs, or neighborhood electric vehicles. These were commercially available in the early 2000s, and something like 7,200 of the slightly souped-up golf carts made it into retirement communities and gated neighborhoods.

But as Think aficionado [Hagan Walker] relates, the Achille’s heel of these quirky EVs was its instrument cluster, which had a nasty habit of going bad and taking the whole vehicle down with it, sometimes in flames. So he undertook the effort of completely reverse engineering the original cluster, with the goal of building a plug-in replacement.

The reverse engineering effort itself is pretty interesting, and worth a watch. The microcontroller seems to be the primary point of failure on the cluster, probably getting fried by some stray transients. Luckily, the microcontroller is still available, and swapping it out is pretty easy thanks to chunky early-2000s SMD components. Programming the MCU, however, is a little tricky. [Hagan] extracted the code from a working cluster and created a hex file, making it easy to flash the new MCU. He has a bunch of other videos, too, covering everything from basic diagnostics to lithium battery swaps for the original golf cart batteries that powered the vehicle.

True, there weren’t many of these EVs made, and fewer still are on the road today. But they’re not without their charm, and keeping the ones that are still around from becoming lawn ornaments — or worse — seems like a noble effort.

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