hiking

7 Articles

Enhiker Helps You Decide If Its A Good Day To Hike

November 22, 2024 by 10 Comments

Many of us check the weather before heading out for the day — we want to know if we’re dressed (or equipped) properly to handle what Mother Nature has planned for us. This is even more important if you’re going out hiking, because you’re going to be out in a more rugged environment. To aid in this regard, [Mukesh Sankhla] built a tool called Enhiker.

The concept is simple; it’s intended to tell you everything you need to know about current and pending conditions before heading out on a hike. It’s based around Unihiker, a single-board computer which also conveniently features a 2.8-inch touch screen. It’s a quad-core ARM device that runs Debian and has WiFi and Bluetooth built in, too. The device is able to query its GPS/GNSS receiver for location information, and then uses this to get accurate weather data online from OpenWeatherMap. It makes some basic analysis, too. For example, it can tell you if it’s a good time to go out, or if there’s a storm likely rolling in, or if the conditions are hot enough to make heat stroke a concern.

It’s a nifty little gadget, and it’s neat to have all the relevant information displayed on one compact device. We’d love to see it upgraded further with cellular connectivity in addition to WiFi; this would make it more capable when out and about.

We’ve seen some other neat hiking hacks before, too, like this antenna built with a hiking pole. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own neat hacks for when you’re out on the trail, don’t hesitate to let us know!

A boy looking at a small wind turbine

Hackaday Prize 2022: A 3D Printed Portable Wind Turbine For Hikers

May 2, 2022 by 44 Comments

If you’re out in the wilderness and off the grid, but still need to charge your phone, the most obvious way to do that is by using a solar panel. Light, flat and without moving parts, they’re easy to store and carry on a hike. But they obviously don’t work in the dark, so what’s a hiker to do if they want to charge their devices at night? If you happen to be in a windy place, then [adriancubas] has the solution for you: a portable wind turbine that folds up to the size of a 2 L soda bottle.

[adrian] designed the turbine to be light and compact enough to take with him on multi-day camping trips. Nearly all parts are 3D printed in PLA, and although ABS or PETG would have been stronger, the current design seems to hold up well in a moderate breeze. The generator core is made from a stepper motor with a bridge rectifier and a capacitor to create a DC output. [adrian] estimates the maximum power output to be around 12 W, which should be more than enough to charge a few beefy power banks overnight.

All parts are available as STL files on [adrian]’s project page, so if you’re looking for some wind power to charge your gadgets on your next camping trip you can go ahead and build one yourself. While we’ve seen large 3D printed wind turbines before, and portable ones for hikers, [adrian]’s clever folding design is a neat step up towards making wind power almost as easy to use as solar power.

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Navigate Around Garmin’s Custom Map Limits

October 4, 2019 by 23 Comments

If your only experience with Garmins is from that one rental car a few years back, it may surprise you that some of them, mostly the handheld outdoor units, allow custom maps. This sounds cool until you find out the limitations. Unless you upgrade to premium, it doesn’t allow map files larger than 3MB. What’s worse, it will choke the resolution of maps larger than one megapixel. Well, bust out your virtual hiking boots, because [facklere]’s gonna take you down the trail of DIY digital cartography.

You can use any map you want as long as its not completely fictional (although wandering the maps of middle-earth would be a fun hack on top of this one). Your map can be paper, PDF, or parchment; it just has to be converted to JPEG. The map [facklere] wanted to use was a huge PDF, so as a bonus, he shows how to get from PDF to JPEG in GIMP. Then comes the fiddly part — rooting the map in reality by overlaying it on real roads using Google Earth.

You’ve still got a huge map. Now what? The secret sauce is tiling. [facklere] used KMZfactory, a free map editor for Garmin maps that goes the extra mile to split the tiles for you, keeping them under the 1MP limit. Once that’s done, just upload it to your unit and hit the road.

Got an old Garmin that won’t do custom maps? See if you can get DOOM up and running on it.

Xpedit Is A Mood Ring For Mother Nature

August 7, 2019 by 4 Comments

Whether you’re in the woods or way up a mountain, basic knowledge of your environment can yield a lot of power. The more you know about the temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and your altitude, the easier it is to predict future weather and stick to your height limits. Sure, you could buy some pre-fab doohickey that does all of this, but why? [DIYMechanics] shows how easy it is to build your own pocket-sized weather station for under $20.

Xpedit’s brain is an ATMega328 running on a 20MHz crystal heartbeat. The atmospheric readings come from a BME280, a nifty all-in-one module that’s available for pennies on Ali. The rotary encoder handles user inputs, and the simple interface displays on an OLED. There’s even a tiny compass embedded in the 3D printed case.

We really like the custom alarm feature, which can buzz you via vibe motor if you’ve climbed too high, or the pressure is dropping. [DIYMechanics] has Xpedit completely open-sourced, so trek on down to the GitHub for the latest Eagles, Gerbers, and INOs. Don’t have a USBtiny ISP yet? He’s got the plans for that, too.

Maybe you’re the indoorsy type who’d rather read about mountainous jungle adventures than experience them firsthand. Add some weather-driven ambiance to your book nook by hacking an IKEA cloud lamp.

Bouncing Pack Eases Those Tired Shoulders

June 9, 2017 by 41 Comments

If you are a hillwalker, wherever your preferred stomping ground may be you’ll know the importance of a pack with a good strap system. A comfortable pack will make the difference between tiredness and agony, and can easily add a considerable difference to your daily range.

At Arizona State University’s Human Integration Laboratory, they were approached by the US Army to investigate means by which the effect of carrying a heavy backpack could be mitigated. A soldier’s full kit is extremely heavy, and while the best available webbing systems will make a contribution to the comfort of carrying it, they can only go so far. There is still the jarring effect of the impulse force of such a significant load bearing down on the soldier’s shoulders as it comes down after every step, and this when taken over a lengthy march makes a significant difference to overall endurance.

The ASU lab’s solution was to mount the load on a spring-loaded vertical actuator attached to the pack harness and frame. The on-board microcontroller judges the moment of maximum downward impulse force as the wearer comes down from a step, and applies a corresponding upward force to the actuator. Power comes from a lithium-ion battery pack. The effect is to make the load oscillate up and down, and to lessen the wear and tear on the shoulders. It does not reduce the weight you are carrying, but it does lift it off your shoulders for an instant just when you need it.

There is a video of it being tested in the sun-drenched Arizona mountains, that we’ve placed below the break.

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Hack Your Hike With This Arduino Puzzle Geocache

May 3, 2017 by 12 Comments

For those who love to hike, no excuse is needed to hit the woods. Other folks, though, need a little coaxing to get into the great outdoors, which is where geocaching comes in: hide something in the woods, post clues to its location online, and they will come. The puzzle is the attraction, and doubly so for this geocache with an Arduino-powered game of Hangman that needs to be solved before the cache is unlocked.

The actual contents of a geocache are rarely the point — after all, it’s the journey, not the destination. But [cliptwings]’ destination is likely to be a real crowd pleaser. Like many geocaches, this one is built into a waterproof plastic ammo can. Inside the can is another door that can only be unlocked by correctly solving a classic game of Hangman. The game itself may look familiar to long-time Hackaday readers, since we featured it back in 2009. Correctly solving the puzzle opens the inner chamber to reveal the geocaching goodness within.

Cleverly, [cliptwings] mounted the volt battery for the Arduino on top of the inner door so that cachers can replace a dead battery and play the game; strangely, the cache entry on Geocaching.com (registration required) does not instruct players to bring a battery along.

It looks like the cache has already been found and solved once since being placed a few days ago in a park north of Tucson, Arizona. Other gadget caches we’ve featured include GPS-enabled reverse caches, and a puzzle cache that requires IR-vision to unlock.

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Micro Wind Turbine For Hikers

March 18, 2017 by 77 Comments

[Nils Ferber] is a product designer from Germany. His portfolio includes everything from kitchen appliances to backpacks. One project, though, has generated a bit of attention. It’s a micro wind turbine aimed at long distance hikers.

Even on the trail, electronics have become a necessity. From GPS units to satellite phones, to ebook readers. Carrying extra batteries means more pack weight, so many hikers utilize solar panels. The problem is that when the sun is up, hikers are on the move – not very conducive to deploying a solar array. The Wind, however, blows all through the night.

[Nils] used carbon fiber tube, ripstop nylon, and techniques more often found in kite building to create his device. The turbine starts as a small cylindrical pack. Deploying it takes only a few minutes of opening panels and rigging guy wires. Once deployed, the turbine is ready to go.

While this is just a prototype, [Nils] claims it generates 5 Watts at a wind speed of 18 km/h, which can be used to charge internal batteries, or sent directly to any USB device. That seems a bit low for such a stiff wind, but again, this is just a prototype. Could you do better? Tell us in the comments! If you’re looking for a DIY wind generator on a slightly larger scale, you could just build one from bike parts.

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