The Future Of Hydrogen Power… Is Paste?

February 6, 2021 by Al Williams 142 Comments

We’ve been promised hydrogen-powered engines for some time now. One downside though is the need for hydrogen vehicles to have heavy high-pressure tanks. While a 700 bar tank and the accompanying fuel cell is acceptable for a city bus or a truck, it becomes problematic with smaller vehicles, especially ones such as scooters or even full-sized motorcycles. The Fraunhofer Institute wants to run smaller vehicles on magnesium hydride in a paste form that they call POWERPASTE.

The idea is that the paste effectively stores hydrogen at normal temperature and pressure, where it stays chemically locked until mixed with water. The researchers note that it will decompose around 250 °C, but while your motorcycle may seem hot when parked in the sun, it isn’t getting quite to 250C.

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Raspberry Pi Takes Over Volvo’s Integrated LCD

February 5, 2021 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

As [Luuk Esselbrugge] explains in a recent blog post, his 2002 Volvo S60 had an optional GPS navigation system and backup camera that used a motorized display that would rise out of the dashboard when needed. His particular car didn’t come with the hardware installed, but after getting his hands on a display module and doing some research, he figured out how he could drive it with the Raspberry Pi and a couple of microcontrollers.

Given the age of the display, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that it uses composite video. Not exactly high resolution, but in the demonstration after the break, we have to admit it looks more than up to the task. [Luuk] is running Android Auto on the Raspberry Pi 3 through the openauto project, which gives him a nice big display and access to all the navigation and media applications you’d expect. The display doesn’t support touch, but thanks to an ESP32 plugged into the CAN bus, he’s able to control the software by reading the buttons built into the Volvo’s steering wheel.

Composite video sources are switched with a simple relay.

To actually raise and lower the display, [Luuk] found you just need to fire a few bytes down the 1,200 baud serial bus that’s built into the display’s wiring harness. The ESP32 handles this duty as well, at least partly because it’s already plugged into the CAN bus and can tell when the vehicle is in reverse. This lets it bring up the screen to show the video feed from the newly installed backup camera in the event that the Pi hadn’t already asked to raise the display. Incidentally plugging in the phone normally triggers the system to wake up and raise the screen, and disconnecting it will command the screen to lower back into the stowed position.

The attentive reader or Volvo aficionado may be wondering how [Luuk] got the audio working. Since his car’s sound system doesn’t feature an auxiliary input, he’s using an Arduino to spoof the existence of a CD changer, which allows him to inject an audio signal into one of the pins on the back of the radio. Eventually he wants to move this task over to the ESP32, but he says a big change like that will have to wait until warmer weather.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Raspberry Pi used to add enhanced features to a somewhat older vehicle. While some bemoan the increased complexity of modern vehicles, it seems some hackers can’t get enough of it.

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3D Printing A Full Scale Fiberglass Speedboat

January 30, 2021 by Al Williams 15 Comments

It’s an age-old problem. You draw up a nice 6.5-meter long motorboat and then discover the shape won’t allow for a fiberglass mold. What do you do? If you’re [Moi], you grab a few Kuka robots and 3D print it using thermoplastic with embedded glass fibers. A UV light cures the plastic and you wind up with printed fiberglass. That’s the story behind the MAMBO, a 3D printed powerboat.

Despite the color, the fiberglass isn’t blue out of the gate — the boat is painted. Still, it looks nice with lines inspired by [Sonny Levi]’s Arcidiavolo design from 1973. MAMBO stands for Motor Additive Manufacturing BOat. It has a dry weight of about 800 kg and is fitted with a cork floor, white leather seats, and an engine. We presume none of those things were 3D printed.

Although it wasn’t fiberglass, we’ve seen a 3D printed boat before. In particular, the University of Maine’s giant 22,000 square foot printer cranked one out. We’ve also seen boats printed in standard PLA filament, which then had fiberglass cloth and resin applied after printing. True that one was only RC, but there’s no reason the concept couldn’t be scaled up if you had the patience.

Scrappy: Drag Racing Bush Plane

January 30, 2021 by Danie Conradie 19 Comments

We like to feature hacks that are affordable and accessible to the average person, but from time to time it’s fun to dream about the projects we’ll tackle when we’re all grown up and stinking rich. [Mike Patey] appears to fall rather comfortably in the latter category, but thankfully he hasn’t lost his “excited kid with big plans” spirit. A talented and experienced experimental aircraft builder, he’s currently working on Scrappy, a small bush plane built to be a short take-off and landing drag racer.

Scrappy started life as a Carbon Cub, a modernized kit version of the venerable Piper Super Cub. The only thing left of the original plane is a part of the fuselage frame, with almost everything else being custom. The engine is a 780 cubic inch (13 liter) horizontally opposed 8-cylinder, scavenged from one of [Mike]’s racing planes, and fitting it required extensive structural changes to the fuselage. The paddle-like propeller was intended for an airboat, and is designed for high thrust at low speeds. The skin of the aircraft is all carbon fiber, and the suspension almost looks like it’s borrowed from an off-road racing truck. [Mike] also added (and test fired) a ballistic recovery parachute. The cockpit instruments are also over-the-top for an aircraft like this, with seven Garmin multi-function displays.

Scrappy is still missing its wings, which will also be heavily modified. From the oil-cooling system to the door latch and gust-lock for the stick, everything was designed and made by [Mike]. We’re enjoying the in-depth build videos that show how he tackles all the little challenges that pop-up in such an ambitious project.

[Mike] made a name for himself with his previous monster bush plane Draco, which was sadly destroyed during an ill-considered take-off last year. Fortunately nobody was harmed in the incident, and Draco became a part donor for Scrappy. If budget planes are more your style, check out [Peter Sripol]’s latest electric microlight.

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The Politics Of Supersonic Flight: The Concord(e)

January 25, 2021 by Jenny List 29 Comments

Every nation has icons of national pride: a sports star, a space mission, or a piece of architecture. Usually they encapsulate a country’s spirit, so citizens can look up from their dreary lives and say “Now there‘s something I can take pride in!” Concorde, the supersonic airliner beloved by the late 20th century elite for their Atlantic crossings, was a genuine bona-fide British engineering icon.

But this icon is unique as symbols of national pride go, because we share it with the French. For every British Airways Concorde that plied the Atlantic from London, there was another doing the same from Paris, and for every British designed or built Concorde component there was another with a French pedigree. This unexpected international collaboration gave us the world’s most successful supersonic airliner, and given the political manoeuverings that surrounded its gestation, the fact that it made it to the skies at all is something of a minor miracle. Continue reading “The Politics Of Supersonic Flight: The Concord(e)” →

An Alternator Powered Electric Bicycle Gives Rotor Magnetic Field Insight

January 24, 2021 by Jenny List 63 Comments

For anyone involved in the construction of small electric vehicles it has become a matter of great interest that a cheap high-power electric motor can be made from a humble car alternator. It’s a conversion made possible by the advent of affordable three-phase motor controllers, and it’s well showcased by [austiwawa]’s electric bicycle build video (embedded below).

The bike itself is a straightforward conversion in which the motor powers the rear wheel via an extra sprocket. He tried a centrifugal clutch with limited success, but removed it for the final version. Where the interest lies in this build is in his examination of Hall effect sensor placement.

Most alternator conversions work without sensors, though for better control it’s worth adding these magnetic sensors to allow the controller to more directly sense the rotation. He initially placed them at the top of the stator coils and found them to be ineffectual, with the big discovery coming when he looked at the rotor. The electromagnet in the rotor on a car alternator has triangular poles with the field concentrated in the centre of the stator, thus a move of the sensors to half way down the stator solved the problem. Something to note, for anyone converting an alternator.

Should you wish to give it a try, a year ago we published a primer on turning car parts into motors.

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Multi-Channel Battery Monitor Aces First Sea Trial

January 20, 2021 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

A little over a a year ago, we covered an impressive battery monitor that [Timo Birnschein] was designing for his boat. With dedicated batteries for starting the engines, cranking over the generator, and providing power to lights and other amenities, the device had to keep tabs on several banks of cells to make sure no onboard systems were dipping into the danger zone. While it was still a work in progress, it seemed things were progressing along quickly.

But we know how it is. Sometimes a project unexpectedly goes from having your full attention to winning an all-expense-paid trip to the back burner. In this case, [Timo] only recently put the necessary finishing touches on his monitor and got it installed on the boat. Recent log entries on the project’s Hackaday.io page detail some of the changes made since the last time we checked in, and describe the successful first test of the system on the water.

Certainly the biggest issue that was preventing [Timo] from actually using the monitor previously was the lack of an enclosure and mounting system for it. He’s now addressed those points with his 3D printer, and in the write-up provides a few tips on shipboard ergonomics when it comes to mounting a display you’ll need to see from different angles.

The printed enclosure also allowed for the addition of some niceties like an integrated 7805 voltage regulator to provide a solid 5 V to the electronics, as well as a loud piezo beeper that will alert him to problems even when he can’t see the screen.

Under the hood he’s also made some notable software improvements. With the help of a newer and faster TFT display library, he’s created a more modern user interface complete with a color coded rolling graph to show voltages changes over time. There’s still a good chunk of screen real estate available, so he’s currently brainstorming other visualizations or functions to implement. The software isn’t using the onboard NRF24 radio yet, though with code space quickly running out on the Arduino Nano, there’s some concern about getting it implemented.

As we said the first time we covered this project, you don’t need to have a boat to learn a little something from the work [Timo] has put into his monitoring system. Whether you’re tracking battery voltages or temperatures reported by your BLE thermometers, a centralized dashboard that can collect and visualize that data is a handy thing to have.