Thrift Store Razor Scooter Gets More Kick

December 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

Beyond pride, the biggest issue keeping adults off small motorized scooters is the fact that their tiny motors usually don’t have the power to move anything heavier than your average eighth grader. That didn’t stop [The_Didlyest] from snapping up this $7 thrift store find, but it did mean the hot pink scooter would need to be beefed up if it had any hope of moving 170 lbs of hacker.

Logically, the first step was fitting a more capable motor. [The_Didlyest] used an electric wheelchair motor which had a similar enough diameter that mounting it was fairly straightforward. The original sprocket and chain are still used, as are the mounting holes in the frame (though they had to be tapped to a larger size). That said, the new motor is considerably longer than its predecessor so some frame metal had to be cut away. This left the scooter without a kickstand and with a few inches of motor hanging out of its left side, but it’s all in the name of progress.

Naturally the upgraded motor needed similarly upgraded batteries to power it, so [The_Didlyest] put together a custom pack using eighteen 18650 cells spot welded together for a total output of 25V. Coupled with a 60A battery management system (BMS), the final 6S 3P configured pack is a very professional little unit, though the liberal application of duct tape keeps it from getting too full of itself.

Unfortunately the original motor controller consisted of nothing but relays, and didn’t allow adjusting speed. So that needed to go as well. In its place is a homebrew speed controller made with three parallel MOSFETs and an Arduino to read the analog value from the throttle and convert that into a PWM signal.

[The_Didlyest] says the rear tire is now in need of an upgrade to transmit all this new power to the road, and some gearing might be in order, but otherwise the scooter rebuild was a complete success. Capable of mastering hills and with a top speed of about 10 MPH, the performance is certainly better than the stock hardware.

Of course this is far from the first time we’ve seen somebody put a little extra pepper on a scooter. Some of them even end up being street-legal rides.

Lightsaber Uses Pogo Pins To Make Assembly A Breeze

November 7, 2018 by Kerry Scharfglass 9 Comments

There was an endless supply of fantastic projects at Supercon this year, but one whose fit and finish really stood out was [Scott]’s lightsaber. If you were walking around and saw someone with a very bright RGB device with a chromed-out handle hanging off their belt it was probably this, though it may have been hard to look at directly. On the outside, the saber looks like a well-polished cosplay prop, and it is! But when Scott quickly broke down the device into component pieces it was apparent that extra care had been put into the assembly of the electronics.

Like any good lightsaber replica the blade is lit, and wow is it bright. The construction is fairly simple, it’s a triplet of WS2812B LED strips back to back on a triangular core, mounted inside a translucent polycarbonate tube with a diffuser. Not especially unusual. But the blade can be popped off the hilt at a moments notice for easy transport and storage, so the strips can’t be soldered in. Connectors would have worked, but who wants flying wires when they’re disconnecting their lightsaber blade. The answer? Pogo pins! Scott runs the power, ground, and data lines out of the strips and into a small board with slip ring-style plated rings. On the hilt, there is a matching array of pogo pins to pass along power and data. The data lines from all the strips are tied together minimizing the number of connections to make, and the outer two power rings have more than one pin for better current-carrying capacity. A handy side effect is that there is nowhere on the blade where there aren’t LEDs; the strips go down to the very end of the blade where it meets the main board inside the hilt.

The hilt is filled with an assembly of 18650’s and a Teensy mounted with a custom shield, all fit inside a printed midframe. The whole build is all about robust design that’s easy to assemble. The main board is book-ended by perpendicular PCBs mounted to the ends, one at the top to connect to the blade and one at the bottom to connect to a speaker. Towards the bottom there is space for an optional Bluetooth radio to allow remote RGB control.

Scott is selling this as a product but also provides detailed instructions and parts lists for each component. Assembly instructions for the blade are here. The hilt is here. And pogo adapters are on OSH Park here. An overview of the firmware with links to GitHub is here. Check out a walkthrough of the handle assembly and blade attachment after the break!

Continue reading “Lightsaber Uses Pogo Pins To Make Assembly A Breeze” →

DIY Arc Light Makes An Unnecessarily Powerful Bicycle Headlight

October 17, 2018 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

Remember when tricking out a bike with a headlight meant clamping a big, chrome, bullet-shaped light to your handlebar and bolting a small generator to your front fork? Turning on the headlight meant flipping the generator into contact with the front wheel, powering the incandescent bulb for the few feet it took for the drag thus introduced to grind you to a halt. This ridiculous arc-lamp bicycle headlight is not that. Not by a long shot.

We’re used to seeing [Alex] doing all manner of improbable, and sometimes impossible, things on his popular KREOSAN YouTube channel. And we’re also used to watching his videos in Russian, which detracts not a whit from the entertainment value for Andglophones; subtitles are provided for the unadventurous, however. The electrodes for his arc light are graphite brushes from an electric streetcar, while the battery is an incredibly sketchy-looking collection of 98 18650 lithium-ion cells. A scary rat’s nest of coiled cable acts as a ballast to mitigate the effects of shorting when the arc is struck. The reflector is an old satellite TV dish covered in foil tape with the electrodes sitting in a makeshift holder where the feedhorn used to be. It’s bright, it’s noisy, it’s dangerous, and it smokes like a fiend, but we love it.

Mounting it to the front of the bike was just for fun, of course, and it works despite the janky nature of the construction. The neighbors into whose apartments the light was projected could not be reached for comment, but we assume they were as amused as we were.

Continue reading “DIY Arc Light Makes An Unnecessarily Powerful Bicycle Headlight” →

Keep ‘Em Flying With This Monster DIY Battery

October 3, 2018 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

If you’ve spent an afternoon at the sticks of a remote-controlled aircraft, you’re probably well aware of the great limiter for such exploits: battery life. In the days when most RC aircraft were gas powered it was easy to cart along some extra fuel to keep the good times rolling, but now that everything except big scale models are using electric motors, RC pilots are looking for better ways to charge their batteries in the field.

Though it might seem counter-intuitive, [Adam Pyschny] is of the opinion that the best way to keep his quadcopter batteries charged is to simply use another, much bigger, battery. Rather than mess around with inverters or generators, he can simply use a DC-to-DC battery charger and his huge custom-built battery pack to keep flying.

The pack contains 36 Samsung INR18650-35E 3500mAh cells, which gives it a total capacity of 454Wh. At 1965 grams (4.3 lbs) the pack isn’t exactly a featherweight, but it’s significantly lighter than carting a small generator or even a lead-acid battery to the field.

[Adam] designed a slick case in FreeCAD and printed it in Minadax ASA-X filament, which is specifically designed for outdoor use. A particularly nice detail in the case is that the balance connector (used to charge the cells) is cleanly integrated into the side of the pack, rather than just flapping around in the breeze; which annoyingly seems the norm even on commercially produced batteries.

An interesting next step for this project would be the addition of a solar panel and charge controller to help recover in-between charges. Beyond an automated platform to swap the batteries for you, a DIY pack like this might be the easiest way to maximize the amount of time your RC aircraft are in the air where they belong.

The Quick-Build PowerWall

August 11, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 106 Comments

Elon Musk isn’t just the greatest human being — he’s also a great inventor. He’s invented the reusable rocket, the electric car, and so much more. While those are fantastic achievements, Elon’s greatest invention is probably the PowerWall. The idea of a PowerWall is simple and has been around for years: just get a bunch of batteries and build a giant UPS for your house. Elon brought it to the forefront, though, and DIYers around the world are building their own. Thanks, Elon.

Of course, while the idea of building your own PowerWall is simple, the devil is in the details. How are you going to buy all those batteries? How are you going to connect them together? How do you connect it to your fuse box? It’s a systems integration nightmare, made even more difficult by the fact that lithium cells can catch fire if you do something wrong. [jehugarcia] is building his own PowerWall, and he might have hit upon an interesting solution. He’s built a modular system to store and charge hundreds of 18650 cells. It looks great, and this might be the answer to anyone wanting to build their own PowerWall.

Aside from acquiring hundreds of 18650 cells, the biggest problem in building a PowerWall is simply connecting all the cells together. This can be done with 3D printed battery holders, solder, and bus bars, with a few people experimenting with spot welding wires directly onto the cells. This project might be a better solution: it uses standard plastic battery holders easily acquired from your favorite Chinese retailer and a PCB to turn cells into a battery.

The design of this battery module consists of a PCB with sufficiently wide traces, an XT60 power connector, and a few headers for the balance connector of a charger. This is a seven cell setup, and in contrast to the hundreds of hours that go into making a PowerWall the old fashioned way, these modules can be assembled pretty quickly.

Testing of these modules revealed no explosions, and everything worked as intended. There was a problem, though: when drawing a high load, the terminals of these cheap battery connectors got up to 150°. That makes these modules unsuitable for high load applications like an e-bike, but it should be okay if you’re putting hundreds of these modules together to power your house. It might be a good idea to invest in some cooling, though.
Continue reading “The Quick-Build PowerWall” →

A Mobile Computer To Make William Gibson Jealous

July 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

The personal computers in science fiction books, movies, and games are way cooler than the dinky pieces of hardware we’re stuck with in the real world. Granted the modern laptop has a bit more style than the beige boxes of yesteryear, but they still aren’t half as l33t as the custom PowerBooks in Hackers. Luckily for those who dream of jacking into the Matrix, the average hacker now has access to the technology required to make a custom computer to whatever fanciful specifications they wish.

A perfect example is this “cyberdeck” created by [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]. Inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this wild-looking machine is more than just a cosplay prop or conversation piece. It packs in enough power to be a daily-driver computer, as well as some special features which make it well suited for field work.

The body of the cyberdeck is 3D printed, but as [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] doesn’t have a 3D printer big enough to do the whole thing in one piece he had to break it up into subsections. He added a dovetail pattern to the edges of each piece, which makes for much stronger joint than simply gluing it together. A worthwhile tip if you ever find yourself in need of printing something really big.

Raspberry Pi aficionados might be disappointed to see the Intel NUC motherboard inside; which features a 3.4 Ghz dual-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a roomy 500 GB SSD in an incredibly small package. To keep everything running the machine can take up to twelve 18650 cells, giving it a maximum run-time of sixteen hours or so. There’s even a 12 V power jack so he can power a soldering iron and other low voltage gadgets off of the deck’s batteries in a pinch. The integrated charger can take anywhere from 6 to 30 V, which gives [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] the ability to charge up from a wide array of sources.

But perhaps the best feature of the cyberdeck is the display. It uses a Fat Shark Transformer, a five inch 720p display designed for FPV drone use, which can not only fold flat against the deck for storage, but can be removed and slipped into a pair of goggles. This gives the cyberdeck a head mounted display that looks like something straight out of the movies. It even supports 3D, if you’re willing to cut the resolution in half.

Things have come a long way in the world of DIY head mounted computer displays. Really makes you wonder what the dedicated hacker is going to be able to pull off in another 10 years or so.

[via /r/cyberpunk]

Transforming A Bookshelf Speaker Into A Portable Boombox

July 18, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 7 Comments

There’s a lot of fun to be had in modernizing an old boombox but what about turning one of those ubiquitous shelf speakers into a portable boombox, complete with a handle for carrying? That’s what [GreatScott] did when a friend gave him a just such a shelf speaker.

These days you’d very likely use your phone as the audio source so he included a 20 watt stereo class D amplifier which could be disconnected at the throw of a switch if not needed. To power the amplifier he used 16 18650 lithium-ion batteries which were leftover from previous projects. He estimates they should give him around 100 hours of enjoyable tunes. And to make further use of the batteries, he also added a USB charger so that he could charge up his phone from it, something else which is nice to be able to do when on the road.

A battery management system (BMS), an XT60 connector for charging the batteries, his battery level indicator circuit which we talked about before, a new passive audio crossover, and some rather nice work on that case all round out the boombox. Check out his full construction in the video below and make sure to stay until the end when he gives a taste of its awesome sound (you may even swear your desk is vibrating from the bass despite wearing earbuds, like we did).

And on the subject of speaker-to-boombox conversions, here’s one from a few years ago which makes use of a car MP3 player module giving it FM, USB, and SD card support.

Continue reading “Transforming A Bookshelf Speaker Into A Portable Boombox” →