In one of the most interesting electric vehicle partnerships of 2010, Tesla and Toyota announced last year that they would jointly build an electric RAV4, combining Toyota’s SUV with Tesla’s battery and EV tech. For this week’s episode of GigaOM TV’s Green Overdrive Show, we grab some time with the RAV4 EV’s chief engineer, learn about the partner’s future plans and check out the inaugural car!
[mudlevel] built this rainbow graffiti producing robot for an art exhibit in San Diego. While there are no build details we can easily pick this apart from the pictures. Looks like the brains are an arduino, the drive is a power drill with the trigger removed, and a few other servos for firing the spray cans. The counter weighted arm for creating the rainbow was a pretty good idea too. Watching this, we had an idea for a super simple purely mechanical way to do this that would be similar to a catapult. You could use the motion of the trailer to “wind up” the counter balance with a simple ratcheting spool of string attached to the axle. Engage your spray cans and let the balance drop and you’re done. Pedal on to re-wind the counterbalance for another rainbow.
Yesterday the city of Denver celebrated Earth Day by launching the first large-scale bike sharing network in the US! Dubbed B-Cycle, the program offers offers roughly 400 red Trek B-cycles at 40 B-stations throughout the City. A launch event at the City and County buildings kicked off the program and afterward the Mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper, led a bike parade around the Civic Center Park.
Read more...Here at Inhabitat we’ve seen our fair share of airplanes repurposed into incredible new forms, but this heavy-duty recycling plan takes the cake. A company called Hydro Lance proposes to transform old, obsolete aircraft into high-speed ocean vessels by replacing their wings with narrow pontoons. An old 727-200 could be converted into a high-speed, ultra-stable passenger ferry capable of traveling at a speed of more than 120 knots (nearly 140 mph).
Read more...We can only imagine how amazing this coffee burning car smells at it speeds down the highway at a maximum of 60mph. Don’t jump out of your seat so quick to get your own, while the idea sounds fantastic, the mileage will bring you back to earth rather quick. At 3 miles per kilo of coffee, it can turn that £36 210 mile trip into one between £910 and £1,820 with a stop to re-bean-fill every half hour!
Still, the Car-puccino is an amazing conversion, and we’re getting closer and closer to Back to the Future’s Mr. Fusion
[Thanks Tim]
[Kurt] was using a bike trainer to get in shape for warmer and dryer biking months. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to train if you don’t have reliable data concerning how hard you’re working. There’s commercial solutions for trainer computers but he’d read some rough reviews about them and decided to build his own trainer computer. He’s done a great job of integrating a lot of different data collection sources. He picked up two replacement bike computer sensors to use on the back wheel for speed (the front wheel is stationary with this type of trainer) and on the crank for cadence. He also wears a heart rate monitor and sourced a SparkFun heart rate module to gather that data. Finally, an LM235 analog temperature sensor was combined with a spring clamp to detect the temperature of the trainer’s resistance module.
Data from the sensors is collected with a PIC16F73 microprocessor and fed to a computer over a serial connection. He’s got a screenshot of the realtime graphs that he’s using for feedback while on the bike. This is a useful and practical setup but when he get’s tired of exercising he’s just a few lines of code from converting this into a gaming controller.
[Thanks Justin]
[Alan] did an extraordinary job building a computer controlled model gearbox. His project from several years back is based on a dual-clutch Direct Shift Gearbox that was developed for VW and Audi vehicles. His design uses a gear head motor to provide the locomotion to this transmission. Shifting is computer controlled through serial cable, with servo motors providing the physical motion to change gears. Seeing all these moving parts in the clip after the break might make you a bit dizzy.
This is some extreme model building. It reminds us of the guy who built that aluminum aircraft model that was all over the Internets in December.
[Imsolidstate] is working to add side turn signals to a trailer. These orange clearance lights are illuminated when the vehicle’s headlights are on to increase a long trailer’s visibility. They also blink along with the turn signals on the back of the trailer. A standard 6-pin lighting harness doesn’t support this functionality so the trick is to add them without altering the towing vehicle in any way. He’s using an ATtiny24 microprocessor to interpret the logic from the vehicle and then translate the turn signal and tail light data into a signal for the additional side indicators.
[MetroMPG], an environmentally friendly car enthusiast from Ontario, added a tail to his car to increase gas mileage. This 1998 Pontiac Firefly is a sibling of the cheap and popular Geo Metro. He had already done some work to cover a portion of the rear wheel wells to reduce drag. Using cardboard, duct tape, and an aluminum frame he extended the rear of the car by around six feet.
The results are pretty impressive. His extensive testing can be seen in the video after the break and reveals a Miles Per Gallon increase of 15.1% at 90 km/h to get to 64 MPG. The tail is removable but we’re thinking it’s a pain to keep relocating the tail lights from the original body to the removable one.
Now we’re wondering if someone is doing this to our Smurf-blue Metro that we sold to the junk man for $100 back in 2001. It ran great, if you weren’t caught in the cloud of blue smoke coming out the back.
[Mike] covers his car whenever he puts it into the garage because the top is always open. After years of this ritual he decided to upgrade his garage to automatically cover the vehicle. The car cover, made from a few bed sheets, attaches to the bottom of the garage door. At the front of the stall the cover has two half-pound weights sewn in with plenty of padding to protect the car’s finish. Ropes attach to these weights, travel through a pulley system, and connect to the garage door opener carriage. This $65 dollar solution makes sure [Mike's] car is always taken care of.
[Thanks 02TA]
If you’ve ever had a car with an electrical system problem you know how hard it can be to pin-point the source of your woes. Here’s a hackery solution that uses a diy PCB to monitor the current being drawn off of the alternator.The sensing is provided by an Allegro ACS758 integrated circuit. This chip measures current up to 150A and outputs an analog signal that can be measured by a microcontroller. In this case an AVR ATmega8 measures the signal and spits the info back to a PC via the serial port. This data can be graphed to help locate when too much current is being drawn for the battery to remain charged.
Check out that CNC milled PCB, what a beauty!
[Thanks Joshua via Elektronika]
While this is most likely overkill for a gas gauge, we do thank [VadimS] for sharing the information. He shows us how to build a capacitive liquid sensor using an Arduino, some foil and some wire. He’s basically detecting the difference in capacitance between the foil sheets. As he gets more water in the bottle, the capacitance goes up. At least we think thats what is going on. He has included the source code for the Arduino, both for handling the sensor and running the LCD display shown in the picture above. When completed, this will be used in his dune buggy for a gas gauge.
The Remote Bike project, caught our eye today. Inspired by “cliff hangers” on the tv show “The Price Is Right”, [atduskgreg] has built his own version. In this version, the bike on the mountain makes progress, or slides back down the mountain based on the speed you pedal. If you maintain your target speed long enough, you make it to the top of the mountain and win. The RPMs are gathered from a stationary bike using a hall effect sensor, then piped to an Arduino that controls the bike via a stepper motor and string. That seems fun, and a decent alternative to biking through google maps or something. We have to wonder how long this would be amusing though. Then again, when you’re on a stationary bike you are usually just using a timer or a heart rate monitor anyway, so this is pretty cool.
[via flickr]
If you’re marooned on a desert island, you want to have a Professor who can build useful items out of coconuts. [LostMachine] is one of those guys, and he’s currently building a land-loving pirate ship. The wacky vehicle will use the giant wheel above to propel the vessel while the captain sits comfortably in the lofty crow’s nest. A crack-pot concept? Not really, he plans to take this to Burning Man where it will be a fairly useful build compared to the folks who have really gone off the deep end.
The story here is the build quality. Take some time to watch his videos which we’ve embedded after the break. In the first, he details his method for creating a precisely level building surface on top of his uneven driveway. This is accomplished by welding supports in a circle that are level compared to the center point. He goes on to share his liquid-cooling system for cutting the pipe supports with a custom-built jig and an old windshield washer water system pump from an RV (second video). The final video shows the construction of the wheel which came in with 2000 welds and about 250-300 hours of construction time.
If you hadn’t guessed, [LostMachine] is a structural engineer. Unfortunately he was laid-off this spring which has put a damper in his building schedule. We hope that with a quality project like this in his portfolio a new job is just around the corner for him.
[Blacklight99] made this cool tool. It is a tester for those radar detectors that people keep in their cars. Though this seems like it would rarely be a tool we would need, it’s an interesting project. Some speed guns that the police use have a “stealth” mode that makes them invisible to some detectors. This tool can tell you if your detector is vulnerable to this. While this really is just a complicated flashing LED, he notes that it could be taken further to be made into a detector that is programmable and not vulnerable to any of the stealth modes.
Read more...
[Mark] wanted a Segway but why buy something if you can have more fun building it? His end product is an amazing homemade version of the self-balancing transportation package. We’ve seen several projects that include auto-balance, but this one is large enough to ride on and has a bit of an advantage in the design. The motors, batteries, and other components are mounted below the wheel hubs and are weight balanced. This means that the device wants to find balance naturally, even when the electronics are switched off.
The frame was modeled in CAD and then welded together. For propulsion [Mark] has installed two 750 Watt motors which will use sprockets and chains to turn the wheels. The machine balances based on data from both a gyroscope and an accelerometer, with the entire packaged tied together using an Arduino.
[Mark's] build log is well laid out and details each part of the build with a different post. His two most recent entries include video of the unit balancing and of him riding the 95% completed project. A big thanks to [Mark] for taking the time to document this so that we can share in the excitement of a well-executed project.
[Jukka] wanted a bike light that wasn’t afraid to go into the woods during the dark winter. He put together a lamp that uses eight 3 Watt LEDs to pump out 1680 lumens (english translation). The high power LEDs were mounted on a large aluminum heat sink and use lenses to optimize the beam of light. The system uses a 2 amp driver board that he assembled himself. Power is provided by sixteen AA Nickel Metal Hydride batteries that are housed along with the driver circuit in a water bottle.
This more than doubles the output of the last bike light we thought was too bright. Where will this lumen-arms-race stop?
[Thanks Sami]
Want to be visible when cycling at night? [Neon Dean] came up with this possible solution, which he cruised on at Nuit Blanche. Its a bicycle with neon lights mounted on every surface possible. [Dean], who gave a similar treatment to his car, explained how it worked. All of the tubes take their power from a 12VDC battery he carries in a fanny pack. 12V is a far too low voltage to power the tubes, so a step up transformer is used to bring that number way up. [Dean] also decided to install a neon tube on each wheel. In order to deliver power to them, he mounted a rotor on each wheel, with two conductive tracks running close to the edge of each rotor. Two strips of steel act as brushes (in a manner similar to those on slot cars), and deliver the stepped-up power to the tubes. One creative, but perhaps not so bright, idea is [Dean]’s neon tube helmet.
This jet powered carousel is brought to you by the Madagascar Institute. They convene, or collide, to create large scale art, sculptures, and rides. This one seems to fit the last definition. The two gentlemen are strapped to a jet powered carousel. It actually looks pretty fun, but we would have been needing some fresh shorts after the jet bursts into flames near the end. He didn’t seem too concerned, he wasn’t screaming and flailing his arms at least.
As part of a “disruptive technologies” course at the United States Military Academy, [Roy D. Ragsdale] produced a working prototype of a Google Street View-like system called PhotoTrail. Like its corporate-backed inspiration, the system captures georeferenced 360-degree panoramas that can be viewed interactively in a web browser…but at a hardware cost of only around $300. [Ragsdale’s] prototype is based entirely on consumer-grade off-the-shelf components and open source software, all tied together by the yin and yang of DIY: foam core board and a few Python scripts.
This article from IEEE Spectrum magazine provides some background on the selection of parts and construction of the system, including a hardware shopping list and a list of links to all of the open source packages used.
The PhotoTrail prototype is surprisingly small and lightweight. A vehicle isn’t even required; the camera array can be carried overhead by a single person, making it possible to capture remote locations. But [Roy] expects future revisions to be even smaller and less obtrusive, perhaps mounted to a headband. Mount Everest awaits!
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