Self-Portaging Canoe Is Part Bicycle

October 19, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

Normally when making a long voyage in a canoe, an adventurer would paddle the vessel as far as possible and then “portage”, or carry, the canoe over the short sections of land separating the bodies of water. Portaging is a lot of work, though, since canoes generally aren’t particularly light or designed for traveling over land. To solve this problem, [Ben] is modifying his home-built canoe with some interesting parts to make it into an amphibious vehicle which can much more easily traverse land.

The wheels for the amphibious craft come from BMX bicycles, which have much smaller wheels as well as more robust frames when compared to more traditional bicycles. The rear of the canoe was modified to use a go-kart axle with two driven wheels. An additional set of cranks mounted outboard drive a custom-built paddle to propel the boat when traveling on water. The frame borrows heavily from recumbent bicycle design and includes a similarly comfortable seat, with steering handled by a wheel at the front when traveling on land and a rudder at the rear when traveling over water.

[Ben] intends to take this unique vehicle on a cross-country trip across Scotland, with the first part of the adventure on water via the Caledonian Canal and the return trip on land via the Great Glen Way. Hopefully, there’s no actual portaging required for his trip as the bike components add a tremendous amount of weight to the boat. [Ben] he even added a sail that could theoretically be used in either mode. We’ll be keeping watch for his next videos showing his adventure, and in the meantime daydreaming about other unique bikes that let you travel where bikes normally can’t.

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CW Not Hard Enough? Try This Tiny Paddle

July 22, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

For a long time, a Morse code proficiency was required to obtain an amateur radio license in many jurisdictions around the world, which was a much higher bar of entry than most new hams have to pass. Morse, or continuous wave (CW) is a difficult skill to master, and since the requirement has been dropped from most licensing requirements few radio operators pick up this skill anymore. But if you like a challenge, and Morse itself isn’t hard enough for you, you might want to try out this extremely small Morse paddle.

Originally meant for portable operation, where hiking to something like a mountain top with radio gear demands small, lightweight, and low-power options, this paddle is actually not too complex. It attaches to most radios with a 3.5 mm stereo cable and only has two paddles on flexible metal arms which, when pressed against the center of the device, tell the radio to either produce continuous “dits” or “dahs”. For portable use the key sits inside a tiny plastic case and only needs to be pulled out and flipped around to get started. And, while not waterproof, [N6ARA] reports that it’s so small you likely could just shield it from the rain with your other hand if you needed to.

Presumably, this paddle actually wouldn’t be that much different than using any other paddle except for the fact that it’s not heavy enough to resist the force of use, so you’d have to hold it with your other hand anyway. And, while this is a product available for purchase it’s simple enough that, presumably, the design could easily be duplicated with just a few parts. Paddles like this were made as an improvement to older technology like straight keys which require the operator to produce the correct lengths of tones for each character manually. While you can get higher speeds with a paddle, there are still some dedicated CW operators using a straight key.

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Build A DIY Spinner To Get Your Tempest Game Going

July 5, 2024 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

These days, controls in games are fairly standardized by genre. Most RTSs, FPSs, and RPGs all control more or less the same way. But one type of controller that has fallen by the wayside is the paddle, or spinner. [jesster88] is a big Tempest fan, however, and a spinner is crucial. Thus, what else is there to do but whip up one’s own?

*Tempest is one of the more difficult classic games to categorize.*

The build is based around a wired optical mouse. It’s pulled apart, with its main PCB installed into a 3D printed enclosure. Inside, the optical sensor is pointed at the base of a spinner constructed out of a printed drum and an off-the-shelf knob. The spinner is installed in a skateboard-style bearing for smooth rotation. As it spins, the optical sensor detects the motion and reports it as mouse movement via USB.

[jesster88] uses the device for playing Tempest with MAME. We imagine the technique could be adapted to work with other games that rely on spinner or paddle inputs, too. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping up your own retro game hacks at home, don’t hesitate to let us know!

AI Kayak Controller Lets The Paddle Show The Way

June 10, 2024 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Controlling an e-bike is pretty straightforward. If you want to just let it rip, it’s a no-brainer — or rather, a one-thumber, as a thumb throttle is the way to go. Or, if you’re still looking for a bit of the experience of riding a bike, sensing when the pedals are turning and giving the rider a boost with the motor is a good option.

But what if your e-conveyance is more of the aquatic variety? That’s an interface design problem of a different color, as [Braden Sunwold] has discovered with his DIY e-kayak. We’ve detailed his work on this already, but for a short recap, his goal is to create an electric assist for his inflatable kayak, to give you a boost when you need it without taking away from the experience of kayaking. To that end, he used the motor and propeller from a hydrofoil to provide the needed thrust, while puzzling through the problem of building an unobtrusive yet flexible controller for the motor.

His answer is to mount an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in a waterproof container that can clamp to the kayak paddle. The controller is battery-powered and uses an nRF link to talk to a Raspberry Pi in the kayak’s waterproof electronics box. The sensor also has an LED ring light to provide feedback to the pilot. The controller is set up to support both a manual mode, which just turns on the motor and turns the kayak into a (low) power boat, and an automatic mode, which detects when the pilot is paddling and provides a little thrust in the desired direction of travel.

The video below shows the non-trivial amount of effort [Braden] and his project partner [Jordan] put into making the waterproof enclosure for the controller. The clamp is particularly interesting, especially since it has to keep the sensor properly oriented on the paddle. [Braden] is working on a machine-learning method to analyze paddle motions to discern what the pilot is doing and where the kayak goes. Once he has that model built, it should be time to hit the water and see what this thing can do. We’re eager to see the results.
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Ping Pong Ball-Juggling Robot

January 22, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

There aren’t too many sports named for the sound that is produced during the game. Even though it’s properly referred to as “table tennis” by serious practitioners, ping pong is probably the most obvious. To that end, [Nekojiru] built a ping pong ball juggling robot that used those very acoustics to pinpoint the location of the ball in relation to the robot. Not satisfied with his efforts there, he moved onto a visual solution and built a new juggling rig that uses computer vision instead of sound to keep a ping pong ball aloft.

The main controller is a Raspberry Pi 2 with a Pi camera module attached. After some mishaps with the planned IR vision system, [Nekojiru] decided to use green light to illuminate the ball. He notes that OpenCV probably wouldn’t have worked for him because it’s not fast enough for the 90 fps that’s required to bounce the ping pong ball. After looking at the incoming data from this system, an algorithm extracts 3D information about the ball and directs the paddle to strike the ball in a particular way.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into real-time object tracking, this is a great project to look over. The control system is well polished and the robot itself looks almost professionally made. Maybe it’s possible to build something similar to test [Nekojiru]’s hypothesis that OpenCV isn’t fast enough for this. If you want to get started in that realm of object tracking, there are some great projects that make use of that piece of software as well.

Failed Kayaking Data Logger Is Something We Want To See Succeed

May 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

How can your love of hobby electronics and your participation in the Canadian National Kayaking Team be combined? Why not use your technical know-how to provide a performance edge? [Geoff Clarke] decided to rig up a paddle for data capture to see if they could learn anything.

Here you can see that a series of flex sensors were applied to one of the business ends of the paddle. These are connected to a microcontroller which is constantly monitoring them and dumping the data onto an SD card. The design will provide about nine minutes of data before the storage is used up. That sounds like a number that might need improving. We could see this being useful to log a series of practice runs on the same course, but with different athletes. By graphing and comparing the data, you should be able to make observations about how the paddle is being held and when force is applied that could help the rest of the team improve.

But we’re way ahead of ourselves. The rig was given a premature test-run and the flex sensors were destroyed by the salt water. We wish this had worked out and hope that [Geoff] will give it another try after rethinking the water proofing.