Autoblog recently posted about the LusoMotors LM23, a track car powered by a Honda CBR1000 that weighs less than 900 pounds. We knew there have been quite a few other home built cars that have foregone traditional engines for motorcycle power plants, so we asked Google for a few project suggestions. It turned up this excellent round up of motorcycle powered cars by The Kneeslider. The usual Caterham suspects show up, but there are many other unique vehicles: from Mini and Fiat conversions to the unique sidemounted engine in the DP1 pictured above. Definitely check out this excellent collection.
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Progressive MyRate Hackable?
Progressive Insurance announced that it will be rolling out its MyRate plan nationally. You participate by plugging a monitoring device into the ODB-II port on your vehicle. Once every six months you upload the collected data from every trip you’ve made. You’ll receive at least a 5% discount and maybe more based on your driving habits. In some states though, you could actually have your rates raised. Progressive will show you the direct impact your driving behavior has on your rate.
Cornell ECE Final Projects: Spring 08
I was starting to wonder when [Bruce] would send in this years final projects from the Electrical and Computer Engineering students at Cornell University. The first project looks like a great one for the green geek – a controllable power usage monitoring power outlet. The music geeks should dig midi trumpet interface, but the car geeks might have problems keeping away from the soldering iron after they see the CAN bus SD card data acquisition system. There are plenty more, so go check em out.
Wiimote Car Accelerometer
This one’s pretty simple, but anyone who’s ever spent time tweaking an engine will appreciate it. [Kevin]’s been using a wiimote to measure the acceleration of his car. He put together a script to dump the accelerometer output to a CSV file, then graphed it with Excel. He notes that the accelerometer output isn’t that precise, but it’s good enough to give you feedback on your mods.
