Transportation Hacks

1519 Articles

A Drone Motor Does E-Bikes

April 5, 2024 by 37 Comments

On paper, the motors from both an electric bicycle and a drone can both take about 500 watts or so of power. Of course, their different applications make them anything but equivalent, as the bike motor is designed for high torque at low speed while the drone motor has very little torque but plenty of speed. Can the drone motor do the bike motor’s job? [Pro Know] makes it happen, with a set of speed reducing and torque increasing belts.

The build takes a pretty ordinary bicycle, and replaces the rear brake disk with a large pulley for a toothed belt, which drives a smaller pulley, and through a shaft another set of pulleys to the drone motor. The bracket to hold all this and the very large pulley on the wheel are all 3D printed in PLA-carbon fiber mix.

When it’s assembled, it runs the bike from a small lithium ion pack. That’s not unexpected, but if we’re honest we’d have our doubts as to whether this would survive the open road. It’s evidently a novelty for a YouTube video, and we’d be interested to see how hot the little motor became. However what’s perhaps more interesting is the choice of filament.

Could carbon fibre PLA be strong enough to print a toothed belt pulley? We’d be interested to know more. We saw the same filament combo being tested recently, after all.

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TOMOS Moped Becomes Electric Beast

April 4, 2024 by 12 Comments

The TOMOS 50cc moped, a small motorcycle produced in Yugoslavia and the Netherlands, has for decades been a common sight on European roads and provided the first taste of transport independence for countless youngsters. Unfortunately the company went bankrupt a few years ago, but there are still plenty of them about, and it’s one of these that [Doctor D.S.] gives an electric conversion in the video below the break.

The electronics are a standard 5 kW off-the-shelf Chinese kit, but in this they aren’t the star of the show so much as the work on the bike. As with any old moped it’s a bit ropey, and he strips it down and reconditions every part of it alongside his work fabricating brackets, a battery box, and a seat. It’s a long video, but it’s one of those workshop sequences that you can become engrossed in.

The result appears to be a very practical, powerful (for a moped) and rideable bike, and it’s one we’d have for buzzing around town any day. We’d like to take a look at that battery box and seat combo on the interests of safety, but otherwise it’s pretty spot-on. Sit back and enjoy a bit of quality workshop video!

If you’re hungry for more, this is by no means the first road bike electric conversion we’ve brought you.

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Reduction of a physical map to a graph.

Where Graph Theory Meets The Road: The Algorithms Behind Route Planning

April 4, 2024 by 33 Comments

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those depending on the chosen methods of transport. For today’s generations no such contrivances are required, with technology having obliterated even the a need to splurge good money on a GPS navigation device and annual map updates.

These days, you get out a computing device, open Google Maps or equivalent, ask it how you should travel somewhere, and most of the time the provided route will be the correct one, including the fine details such as train platform and departure times. Yet how does all of this seemingly magical route planning technology work? It’s often assumed that Dijkstra’s algorithm, or the A* graph traversal algorithm is used, but the reality is that although these pure graph theory algorithms are decidedly influential, they cannot be applied verbatim to the reality of graph traversal between destinations in the physical world.

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Trick Your (1970) Pickup Truck

March 26, 2024 by 24 Comments

[Dave] wanted an old pickup, and he found a GMC Sierra Grande truck vintage 1970. While it had an unusual amount of options, there weren’t that many high-tech options over 50 years ago. The five-year-long restoration work was impressive, as you can see in the video below, but we were really interested in the electronics part. As [Dave] mentions, the truck was made when the Saturn V was taking people to the moon, but after his modifications, the truck has a lot more computing power than the famous rocket.

He was concerned that the taillights were not up to modern standards and that it would be too easy for someone using their cell phone to plow into the rear of the truck. So he broke out an ESP32 and some LEDs and made an attractive brake light that would have been a high-tech marvel in 1970.

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Retrotechtacular: Build Your Own Dune Buggy, 1970s Style

March 26, 2024 by 21 Comments

The custom car phenomenon is as old as the second-hand car, yet somehow the decades which stick in the mind as their heyday are the 1960s and 1970s. If you didn’t have a dune buggy or a van with outrageously flared arches and an eye-hurting paint job you were nothing in those days — or at least that’s what those of us who were too young to possess such vehicles except as posters on our bedroom walls were led to believe. Periscope Films have put up a period guide from the early 1970s on how to build your own dune buggy, and can we just say it’s got us yearning to drive something just as outrageous?

Of course, auto salvage yards aren’t bursting with Beetles as donor cars in 2024, indeed the accident-damaged model used in the film would almost certainly now be lovingly restored instead of being torn apart to make a dune buggy. We’re taken through the process of stripping and shortening the Beetle floorpan, for which we’re thankful that in 2024 we have decent quality cutting disks, and watching the welder joining thin sheet metal with a stick welder gives us some serious respect for his skills.

Perhaps the part of this video most likely to raise a smile is how it portrays building a car as easy. Anyone who has ever hacked a car to pieces will tell you that’s the easy part, and it’s the building something from the pile of rusty parts which causes so many projects to fail. But given an accident damaged Beetle and a buggy kit in 1972 would we have dug in and given it a try? Of course!

We’ve touched on the Beetle’s hackability in the past, but some of us believe that the crown of most hackable car rests elsewhere.

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Concrete Clears Its Own Snow

March 24, 2024 by 25 Comments

Humans are not creatures well suited to cold environments. Without a large amount of effort to provide clothing, homes, and food to areas with substantial winters, very few of us would survive. The same is true of a lot of our infrastructure since things like ice, frost heave, and large temperature swings can all negatively impact buildings, roadways, and other structures. A team at Drexel University in Pennsylvania has created a type of concrete they hope might solve some issues with the material in cold climates.

Specifically when it comes to sidewalks and roadways, traditional methods of snow and ice removal such as plowing and salting are generally damaging to the surface material, with salting additionally being damaging to vehicles. Freeze-thaw cycles aren’t kind to these surfaces either. This concrete, on the other hand, contains a low-temperature liquid paraffin which releases heat when it has a phase change, from a liquid to a solid. By incorporating the material into the concrete, it can warm itself as temperatures drop, maintaining a temperature above freezing to melt ice and snow. The warming effect isn’t indefinite, but lasts a significant amount of time during testing.

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Magnetic Power Cable Makes Mobility Scooter Much Better

March 21, 2024 by 10 Comments

Sometimes, you have to wonder what major manufacturers of assistive tech are thinking when they design their products. [Niklas Frost]’s father has MS and uses an electric mobility scooter to get around. It’s a good solution to a terrible problem, except it stops short of the most important part — the charging scheme. Because of the aforementioned mobility issues, [Niklas]’s father can’t plug and unplug it without assistance. So much for independence.

And so [Niklas] gave it some thought and came up with an incredibly easy way that Dad can charge his scooter. It’s even non-intrusive — all it took was a handful of off-the-shelf components and some 3D printed parts to make what’s essentially an extension cord between the charger and the scooter. Really, there’s nothing more to it than three 10 A magnetic connectors, an XLR female port, an XLR male connector, and some very helpful plastic.

Something interesting to note: [Niklas] spent a year or so tinkering with a robot that could drive the plug over to the charger and plug it in. A book on the subject made him destroy that robot, however, when he realized that he was being driven more by cool technologies than solving the problem at hand. Within a few days of changing course, [Niklas]’ dad was charging his own scooter.

Now, if [Niklas] wants to see about making the scooter move a whole lot faster, we have just the thing.