Russian EBike Goes Everywhere, Possibly Legal

Electric bikes may be taking the world by storm, but the world itself doesn’t have a single way of regulating ebikes’ use on public roads. Whether or not your ebike is legal to ride on the street or sidewalk where you live depends mostly on… where you live. If you’re lucky enough to live in a place where a bicycle is legally defined as having fewer than four wheels and capable of being powered by a human, though, this interesting bike from Russia might be the best homemade ebike we’ve ever seen. (Video embedded below the break.)

While some of the details of this build might be lost on those of us who do not know any Slavic languages, the video itself shows off the features of this electric vehicle build quite well. It has a custom built frame with two wheels up front, each with its own independent suspension, allowing it to traverse extremely rough terrain with ease even a mountain bike might not be able to achieve. It seems to be powered by a relatively simple rear hub in the single rear wheel, and can probably achieve speeds in the 20 km/h range while holding one passenger and possibly some cargo.

The impressive part of this build isn’t so much the electrification, but rather the suspension components. Anyone looking for an offroad vehicle may be able to take a bit of inspiration from this build. If you’re more interested in the drivetrain, there are plenty of other vehicles that use unique electric drivetrains to check out like this electric boat. And, if you happen to know Russian and see some other interesting details in this build that the native English speakers around here may have missed, leave them in the comments for us.

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LED Stick Person Costume Lights Up The Night

Sometimes a simple idea can yield fantastic results. A few runs of LED strips fastened to a black hoody and sweatpants and just like that…a LED stick person costume for Halloween. The creator of the “Glowy Zoey” [Royce] originally put together some glow in the dark stick person suits to stand out when hitting the slopes at night. Now he’s taken that simple idea for a costume and made a small business out of it.


“I had a lot of extra parts laying around. I gathered everything up and got to work soldering.”  – Royce Hutain

The suits themselves consist of button snaps and ribbon loops sewn into a pattern that routes the LED strips around the jacket’s hood and down each arm. To make the lighting effect pop, an all black plastic mask is used to cover the wearer’s face. It wouldn’t be that much a stretch to substitute EL wire in place of the LED strips if one were so inclined. We’d wager a number of you could pull this off straight out of the junkbox.

The Glowy Zoey stick figure suits even received some mainstream television press a few years ago when they were featured on Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night show. Note that visiting the Glowy Zoey website may take you back a bit since it features one of those autoplay jingles that were so prevalent in the Web 1.0 days. In fact the same jingle is used in the video below from their YouTube channel:

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Help For High-Frequency Hobbyists

Dead-bug circuit building is not a pretty affair, but hey, function over form. We usually make them because we don’t have a copper circuit board available or the duty of making one at home is not worth the efforts and chemical stains.

[Robert Melville and Alaina G. Levine] bring to light a compromise for high-frequency prototypes which uses the typical FR4 blank circuit board, but no etching chemicals. The problem with high-frequency radio is that building a circuit on a breadboard will not work because there is too much added inductance and capacitance from the wiring that will wreak havoc on the whole circuit. The solution is not new, build your radio module on a circuit board by constructing “lands” over a conductive ground plane, where components can be isolated on the same unetched board.

All right, sometimes dead-bug circuits capture an aesthetic all their own, especially when they look like this and they do allow for a darned small package for one-off designs.

Power Steering Pump Repurposed For Great Speed

Electric bikes are getting a lot of attention lately. Pretty much anyone can buy a kit online and get a perfectly street legal ride with plenty of range. But if you don’t want to take the kit route, and you’d rather take a tack that will get you noticed more around these parts, take some notes from [Jule553648]’s recent build that definitely isn’t using any parts from a kit.

The motor from the build is an electric power steering pump from a junkyard car. This gets mounted on a one-off rear bike rack and drives the rear tire with help from some gears from a pocket bike gearbox from eBay. A lot of the parts in this build were designed and built using CAD and a machine shop, and the parts for the battery and the power controller were sourced via China to save on cost.

The whole build has a homemade vibe that we find irresistible. The bike can go 35 km/h on level ground without breaking a sweat and has about 40 km of range which is nothing to scoff at. It might even be street legal depending on the wattage of the motor and whether or not you live in Europe (where throttles are generally not allowed on electric bikes). If you’re lacking a machine shop, though, we featured a very well-built kit ebike a while back that you could use as a model to get your feet wet.

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No-Etch Circuit Board Printing

If you’ve ever tried to build a printed circuit board from home, you know how much of a pain it can be. There are buckets of acid to lug around, lots of waiting and frustration, and often times the quality of the circuits that can be made traditionally with a home setup isn’t that great in the end. Luckily, [Rich] has come up with a way that eliminates multiple prints and the acid needed for etching.

His process involves using a laser printer (as opposed to an inkjet printer, as is tradition) to get a layer of silver adhesive to stick to a piece of paper. The silver adheres to the toner like glitter sticks to Elmer’s glue, and allows a single pass of a laser printer to make a reliable circuit. From there, the paper can be fastened to something more solid, and components can be reflow soldered to it.

[Rich] does post several warnings about this method though. The silver is likely not healthy, so avoid contact with it, and when it’s applied to the toner an indeterminate brown smoke is released, which is also likely not healthy. Warnings aside, though, this is a great method for making home-made PCBs, especially if you don’t want tubs of acid lying around the house, however useful.

Thanks to [Chris] for the tip!

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A CNC Build Log From The Not So Distant Past

2007 wasn’t that long ago, but [Adam Ziegler’s] build log is, nevertheless, a pleasant romp through a not so distant past. From beginning to the end of the build, we enjoyed reading [Adam]’s progress and struggles as he worked through the build. Sometimes it’s hard to see the very normal daily work that goes into a project when it’s all polished up at the end.

He designed the mechanics himself, but after some less-successful attempts, decided to just buy the electronics. The machine is a well executed MDF gantry mill with conduit rails and 6000-series ball bearings on angle stock. It’s a good example of what you can do with cheap materials and careful planning.

[Adam] ran a few jobs on the machine, some of which he took on before it was even built (which he doesn’t recommend doing). After his adventure with this gateway machine, he’s put it up for sale and is purportedly working on a new model. The standard pattern of CNC addiction is a live alive and well.

If you’re looking to get into CNC machining on the cheap, we’ve seen similar affordable builds for your inspiration.

Homemade High Voltage Caps

Do you happen to have any 15,000 volt capacitors sitting around? [Ludic Science] didn’t so he did the next best thing. He built some.

If you understand the physics behind a capacitor (two parallel conductors separated by a dielectric) you won’t find the build process very surprising. [Ludic] uses transparency film as an insulator and aluminum foil for the conductive plates. Then he wraps them into a tube. He did throw in a few interesting tips about keeping the sheets smooth and how to attach the wires to the foil. The brown paper wrapper reminded us of old caps you might find in an antique radio.

The best part by far, though, was the demonstration of drawing an arc from a high voltage power supply with and without the capacitor in the circuit. As you might expect, playing with a few thousand volts charged into a capacitor requires a certain amount of caution, so be careful!

[Ludic] measured the capacitance value with a standard meter, but it wasn’t clear where the 15,000 volt rating came from. Maybe it was the power supply he used in the video and the capacitor could actually go higher.

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