Star Wars Speeder’s Finishing Touch: Mirrors

November 8, 2017 by Donald Papp 19 Comments

[Super 73] make electric scooters, and they made some Star Wars Speeder Bikes with a twist for Halloween; adding some mirrored panels around the bottoms of the bikes made for a decent visual effect that requires no upkeep or fancy workings. Having amazed everyone with the bikes, they followed them up with a video of the build process.

The speeders are shells built around their Super 73 electric scooter, with bases of what looks like MDF sitting on anchor points. Onto the base platforms goes cardboard and expanding foam to create the correct shapes, which are then sanded then coated in fiberglass and bondo. Then it’s time for paint, weathering, and all the assorted bits and pieces needed to make the speeders as screen-accurate as possible. The real finishing touch are the mirrored panels to conceal the wheels and create a levitation illusion. As long as the mirrors are angled so that they reflect the pavement when viewed by a pedestrian, it works fairly well.

Top it off with costumes and a ride around town (with plenty of cameras of course, they naturally wanted to grab some eyeballs) and we have to say, the end result looks nifty. Both the showcase and making-of videos are embedded below.

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3D Printed Hovercraft Takes To The Air

November 6, 2017 by John Baichtal 15 Comments

Instructables user [John_Hagy] and some classmates built an RC hovercraft as their final project in the Robotics Education Lab at NC State University. It’s a foam slab with a Hovership H2204X 2300Kv brushless motor inflating a skirt made out of ripstop nylon. Nylon is great here because it has a low friction coefficient and is nonporous to keep the air in. A second motor propels the craft, with a servo turning the whole motor assembly to steer. The team designed and 3D-printed fan holders which also help channel the air to where it’s supposed to go. Control is via a typical radio-control transmitter and receiver combo.

The project writeup includes a lot of fun detail like previous versions of the hovercraft as well as the research they undertook to learn how to configure the craft — clearly it’s their final paper put on the internet, and well done guys.

Needless to say, we at Hackaday can’t get enough of this sort of thing, as evidenced by this cool-looking hovercraft, this hovercraft made on a budget and this solar-powered ‘craft.

Trainspotting With Junk, For Science

November 6, 2017 by Christian Trapp 33 Comments

[Douglas] hometown Goshen, Indiana takes the state’s motto ‘The Crossroads of America’ seriously, at least when it comes to trains. The city is the meeting point of three heavily frequented railroad tracks that cross near the center of town, resulting in a car-traffic nightmare. When everybody agrees that a situation is bad, it is time to quantify exactly how bad it is. [Douglas] stepped up for this task and delivered.

He describes himself as cheap, and the gear he used to analyze the railroad traffic at a crossing visible from his home certainly fits the bill: a decades-old webcam, a scratched telephoto lens and a laptop with a damaged hinge.

With the hardware in place, the next step was to write the software to count and time passing trains. Doing this in stable conditions with reasonable equipment would pose no problem to any modern image processing library, but challenged with variable lighting and poor image quality, [Douglas] needed another solution.

Instead of looking for actual trains, [Douglas] decided to watch the crossing signals. His program crops the webcam image and then compares the average brightness of the left and right halves to detect blinking. This rudimentary solution is robust enough to handle low light conditions as well as morning glare and passing cars.

The rest is verifying the data, making it fit for processing, and then combining it with publicly available data on car traffic at the affected intersections to estimate impact. The next council meeting will find [Douglas] well prepared. Traffic issues are a great field for citizen science as shown in Stuttgart earlier. If the idea of bolting old lenses to webcams intrigues you, we got you covered as well.

Printed Parts Make DIY Electric Longboard Possible

November 4, 2017 by James Hobson 13 Comments

Appalled by expensive electric longboards, [Conor Patrick] still wanted one, and wanted it now. So — naturally — he converted an existing board into a sprightly electric version at a fraction of the cost.

[Patrick] is using a capable 380KV Propdrive motor, capable of pushing him up to 30mp/h! A waterproof 120A speed controller and 6000mAh, 22.2V LiPo battery slim enough to fit under the board give the motor the needed juice. He ended up buying the cheapest RF receiver and remote combo to control the board, but it fit the all-important “want electric long board now” criterion.

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Inductive Loop Vehicle Detector Gets Modernized

November 4, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 41 Comments

Much like George Lucas and the original Star Wars films, many of us may find that our passion projects are never quite finished, especially when new technology comes around or we just want to make some improvements for their own sake. [Muris] was featured a while back for a vehicle detecting circuit, but is back with some important upgrades to his project. (Which, luckily, do not include any horrible CGI aliens.)

For starters, the entire project has been reworked from the ground up. For anyone unfamiliar with the original project, the circuit detected a vehicle via an inductive loop and was able to perform a task like opening a gate. It now has two independent channels which are polled separately, yet has a reduced parts count which should make construction simpler. The firmware has also been reprogrammed, and in addition to sensing a vehicle’s presence can now also measure the speed of any vehicles passing by.

The complete list of improvements can be found on the project page, and an extensive amount of documentation is available on this if you want to try to roll out your own inductive loop vehicle detector. Of course, this isn’t the only way to detect a vehicle’s presence if inductive loops aren’t really your style.

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How To Build An Airplane In A Month And A Half

November 1, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 49 Comments

For the last few weeks, RC pilot extraordinaire [Peter Sripol] has been working on his biggest project to date. It’s effectively a manned RC plane, now legally a Part 103 ultralight. Now all that work is finally bearing fruit. [Peter] is flying this plane on some short hops down a grass runway. He’s flying it, and proving that you can build a plane in a basement, in under two months, constructed almost entirely out of insulation foam.

[Peter] has been documenting this build on his YouTube channel, and although the materials for this plane are mostly sourced from either Home Depot or Lowes, the construction is remarkably similar to what you would expect to find in other homebuilt aircraft. This thing has plywood gussets, the foam is wearing a thin layer of fiberglass, and the fasteners are from Aircraft Spruce.

The power system is another matter entirely. The engines (all two of them!) are electric and are designed for very large RC aircraft. These engines suck down power from a massive battery pack in the nose, and the twin throttles are really just linear potentiometers hacked onto servo testers. There’s a surprising amount of very important equipment on this plane that is just what [Peter] had sitting around the workshop.

As far as the legality of this ultralight experiment is concerned, [Peter] is pretty much above-board. This is a Part 103 ultralight, and legally any moron can jump in an ultralight and fly. There are some highly entertaining YouTube videos attesting this fact. However, in one of [Peter]’s livestreams, he flew well after sunset without any strobes on the plane. We’re going to call this a variant of go-fever, technically illegal, and something that could merit a call from the FAA. We’re going to give him a pass on this, though.

This build still isn’t done, though. The pitot tube is held onto the windshield with duct tape. The plane was slightly nose heavy, but shifting the batteries around helped with that. [Peter] is running the motors on 12S batteries, and the prop/motor combo should be run on 14S batteries — $1200 of batteries are on order. The entire plane needs a paint job, but there’s no indication that will ever be done. With all that said, this is a functional manned aircraft built in a basement in less than two months.

With the plane complete and ground tests quickly moving on to flight tests, it’s only fitting to mention [Peter]’s GoFundMe page for a parachute. [Peter] is going to fly this thing anyway, and this is a great way to deflect Internet concern trolls. [Peter]’s just short of the $2600 needed for a parachute, but if the funds received go over that amount by a few hundred, a ballistic parachute will save [Peter] and the plane.

Hoverboard Reborn For Electric Rollerblading

October 31, 2017 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Rollerblading is fun, but who needs all that pesky exercise? Wouldn’t strapping on the blades be so much more tempting if you had an electric pusher motor to propel you along your way?

We have to admit that we raised a wary eyebrow as we first watched [MakerMan]’s video below. We thought it was going to be just another hoverboard hack at first, but as we watched, there were some pretty impressive fabrication skills on display. Yes, the project does start with tearing into a defunct hoverboard for parts, primarily one wheel motor and the battery pack. But after that, [MakerMan] took off on a metalworking tear. Parts of the hoverboard chassis were attached to a frame built from solid bar stock — we’ll admit never having seen curves fabricated in quite that way before. The dead 18650 in the battery pack was identified and replaced, and a controller from an e-bike was wired up. Fitted with a thumb throttle and with a bit of padding on the crossbar, it’s almost a ride-upon but not quite. It seems to move along at quite a clip, even making allowances for the time-compression on the video.