Custom Keyfob Fixes Mazda Design Mistake

While Mazda has made some incredible advances in fuel efficient gasoline engines over the past few years, their design group seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel in the meantime, specifically in regards to the modern keyfob design. The enormous size and buttons on the side rather than the face are contrary to what most people need in a keyfob: small size and buttons that don’t accidentally get pressed. Luckily, though, the PCB can be modified with some effort.

This particular keyfob has a relatively simple two-layer design which makes it easy to see where the connections are made. [Hack ‘n’ Tink] did not need the panic button or status LED which allowed him to simply cut away a section of the PCB, but changing the button layout was a little trickier. For that, buttons were soldered to existing leads on the face of the board using 30-gage magnet wire and silicone RTV. From there he simply needed to place the battery in its new location and 3D print the new enclosure.

The end result is a much smaller form factor keyfob with face buttons that are less likely to accidentally get pressed in a pocket. He also made sure that the battery and button relocation wouldn’t impact the antenna performance. It’s a much-needed improvement to a small but crucial part of the car; the only surprise is that a company that’s usually on point with technology and design would flop so badly on such a critical component.

Thanks to [Brian] for the tip!

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Scratch Built Tricycle Maximizes Fuel Efficiency

While the bicycling community is welcoming an influx of electric bikes, there’s a group of tuners on the fringes that are still intent on strapping gas motors of all sizes to bicycles and buzzing down the roads in a loud and raucous fashion. Kits are readily available and are much cheaper than comparable e-bike kits, and with a little bit of work it’s possible to squeeze a lot of excitement from these small motors. With a lot of work, though, you might end up with something like this incredibly fuel efficient and fully customized reverse trike from [Paul Elkins].

The entire goal with this build was fuel efficiency, so the plan is to eventually enclose the vehicle in aerodynamic fairings, most likely using his favorite material, Coroplast. The frame itself is completely hand-made from square tube and welded by [Paul] himself to his own custom specifications. He bolts on a suspension and custom steering rack with levers to control the two front wheels, and the small engine and gas tank are attached to the back above the single drive wheel. The engine hadn’t been started in ten years, but once he got it all put together, it started right up and he was able to take his latest prototype out on the road for a test drive.

While the build isn’t completely finished, the video below (eleventh so far in the build log) is far enough along to show the fruits of years of [Paul]’s labor. It’s taken a while to get a design that worked like he wanted, but with this iteration, he finally has what he was looking for.

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A DIY Enclosed Motorcycle To Keep You Dry In The Rain

Motorcyclist’s vulnerability to bodily harm and weather has spawned several enclosed motorcycle designs over the years. Fascinated by the idea, [Meanwhile in the garage] finally got around to building his own. (Video, embedded below.)

The vehicle started life as a 125cc scooter, stripped of all the unnecessary bits, he welded a steel cockpit onto it. A windshield, doors, and side windows were also added. The ends of the handlebars were cut off and reattached at 90 degrees to fit inside the narrow cockpit. A pair of retractable “training wheels” keep the vehicle upright and at slow speeds.

Legalities aside, we can’t help but think that the first test drives should not have been on a public road. It almost ended in disaster when a loose axle nut on the front wheel caused steering oscillations which caused the vehicle to tip over. Fortunately, there were no injuries and only light cosmetic damage, so a more successful test followed the first.

While many companies have tried, enclosed motorcycles have never achieved much commercial success. Probably because they inhabit a no-mans-land between the rush and freedom of riding a motorcycle and the safety and comfort of a car.

For some less extreme conversion, check out this electric motorcycle, or a rideable tank track.

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Hoverboard Turned Heavy Duty Remote Control Rover

They might not be the hoverboards we were promised in Back to the Future II, but the popular electric scooters that have commandeered the name are exciting pieces of tech in their own way. Not because we’re looking to make a fool of ourselves by actually riding one, but because they’re packed full of useful hardware that’s available for dirt cheap thanks to the economies of scale and the second-hand market.

In his latest video, the ever resourceful [MakerMan] turns a pair of hoverboards into a capable remote controlled mobile platform perfect for…well, whatever you want to move around. Its welded steel construction is certainly up for some heavy duty tasks, and while we can’t say we’d ever tow a SUV with it as shown in the video below, it’s nice to know we’d have the option.

The project starts by liberating the four wheel motors from the scooters and carefully cutting down the frame to preserve the mounting hardware. These mounts are ultimately welded to the frame of the rover, with a piece of diamond plate screwed down on top. On the bottom, [MakerMan] mounts the two control boards and a custom fabricated 36 V battery pack.

He doesn’t go into any detail on how he’s interfacing the RC hardware with the motor controllers, but as we’ve seen with past hacks, there’s open source firmware replacements for these boards that allow them to be controlled by external inputs. Presumably something similar is being used here, but we’d be interested to hear otherwise. Of course you could swap the RC hardware out for a microcontroller or Raspberry Pi if you were looking to make some kind of autonomous rover.

Don’t have a welder or convenient collection of scrap steel laying around? No worries. Prolific tinkerer [Aaron Christophel] put something very similar together using bolted aluminum extrusion.

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After Years Of Uncertainty, Stratolaunch Flies Again

When Paul Allen founded Stratolaunch in 2011, the hope was to make access to space cheaper and faster. The company’s massive carrier aircraft, the largest plane by wingspan ever to be built, would be able to carry rocket-powered vehicles up into the thin upper atmosphere on short notice under the power of its conventional jet engines. The smaller vehicle, free of the drag it would incur in the denser atmosphere closer to the ground, could then be released and continue its journey to space using smaller engines and less propellant than would have been required for a conventional launch.

But Allen, who died in October of 2018, never got to see his gigantic plane fly. It wasn’t until April 13th, 2019 that the prototype carrier aircraft, nicknamed Roc, finally got to stretch its 117 meter (385 feet) wings and soar over the Mojave Desert. By that time, the nature of spaceflight had changed completely. Commercial companies were putting payloads into orbit on their own rockets, and SpaceX was regularly recovering and reusing their first stage boosters. Facing a very different market, and without Allen at the helm, Stratolaunch ceased operations the following month. By June the company’s assets, including Roc, went on the market for $400 million.

Finally, after years of rumors that it was to be scrapped, Allen’s mega-plane has flown for the second time. With new ownership and a new mission, Stratolaunch is poised to reinvent itself as a major player in the emerging field of hypersonic flight.

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An ESP32 Development Board For Sailors

[Matti Airas] wanted to have a better electronics platform for making his boat smarter, more connected, and safer. He found traditional marine electronics expensive and not suited for hacking and tinkering. There was also the issue of lack of interoperability between device generations from the same supplier and between different brands. This led him to design the Sailor Hat with ESP32 — a marine specific, open source hardware development board.

Applications include all kinds of sensor and control interfaces for the boat, such as measurement of fuel or water level, engine RPM, anchoring chain length counter, or setting up smart lighting or smart refrigeration control. The board is designed to work with the traditional NMEA 2000 standard, as well as with Signal K. NMEA 2000 is standardized as IEC 61162-3, but isn’t open source or free. Signal K, on the other hand, is free and open source, and can co-exist alongside NMEA 2000.

The marine environment can be pretty harsh with extremes of temperature, rain, humidity, condensation and vibration. Boats, just like automobiles, have a notoriously noisy electrical environment and [Matti] has paid special attention to noise and surge suppression throughout the board. The board can work with either 12 V or 24 V bus systems since the on board DC-DC converter is rated up to 32 V input. Connections between the board and the outside world need to be very robust, so it is designed to accept various types of connectors depending on how robust you want it to be.

The Sailor Hat is based around a standard ESP32-WROOM-32 module. Interfaces include a CAN bus transceiver, opto-coupled input and output, I2C, 1-wire and QWIIC interfaces, USB Micro-B programming conector, plus a couple of buttons and LEDs. All of the ESP32 GPIO pins are terminated on a GPIO header, with jumper options to disable terminations to the standard interfaces and instead route them to the GPIO header as needed. Additionally, there’s a generous prototyping area to add additional hardware to the board. Hardware design files are hosted on the project repository on GitHub.

On the software side, there are several frameworks that can be used, with PlatformIO, SensESP, ESPHome and Visual Studio Code being the recommended choices. Or you could use any of the widely available SDK’s for the ESP32 platform — Espressif SDK, Arduino Core for ESP32, MicroPython, NodeMCU or Rust.

[Matti]’s NMEA 2000 USB gateway example is a good way to get a grip on hardware assembly and software installation required to build a practical project using the Sailor Hat. The board is designed to withstand a harsh electrical environment. But it’s mechanical installation obviously requires greater care if it has to survive marine applications. The Sailor Hat can be installed in commonly available, 100x68x50 mm or larger plastic waterproof enclosures, rated for IP65 or higher. The bulkhead connectors and cable glands also need to be appropriately rated, and the enclosure may possibly need a IP68 rated ventilation plug to take care of environmental cycling within the enclosure.

SV Seeker Is Recycling Batteries

SV Seeker is a home-made boat currently being built by [Doug Jackson] just north of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s a bit different than what you might imagine as a typical DIY boat, though. You see, Seeker is a 75 ft steel boat, intended to work as a research vessel. Doug and his crew proudly refer to Seeker as “The boat the internet built”, and he’s our kind of people. We’ve covered them before, the first time way back in 2013. Doug’s Youtube channel does double duty, both teaching the rest of us all the skills he’s learned while building, and also serving as the eventual user and repair manual for the boat.
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