Once we had the car in our possession, it was time to strip it of unnecessary components. First on the chopping block? The engine.→InsertImageNormally removing an engine is a bit tricky, but luckily my friend has a big garage with an underground car...
When we started this project, we didn't actually know how we were going to finance it, or where we were even going to get some components -- but we set the wheel in motion and struck luck!→InsertImageWe had sent out a few sponsor emails to local companies...
Now that we have a car and a motor, we need to fill in the gaps. First off is coupling the motor to the original transmission of the car.→InsertImageIn machine shop class I replicated the spline pattern found in the pump motor -- first on the lathe.→InsertImageThen...
Wait a second -- how are we going to control this thing? While a simple ON/OFF switch sufficed for the electric scooters, we don't think it'll work so well with a car...→InsertImageWe picked up an Alltrax 450A 72V golf cart off eBay for a few hundred...
We did it. We took a 1993 Honda Del Sol, and a equally old electric forklift and merged them together into something we like to call the Delsolectric Car.→InsertImageIt might not be pretty. But it worked. We even managed to get it up to 100km/h on the...
In 2002 the Graffiti Research Lab put together the rather excellent L.A.S.E.R. Tag system which allows you to draw virtual graffiti with nothing more than a camera, a projector and a laser pointer. They've done really awesome things with this showing...
I really like these big dome buttons from SparkFun, but they don't come in an RGB flavour. This is really annoying as they would be ideal for the color control on our system.→InsertImageNot to worry though, a couple of minutes with some snips and a soldering...
Yes yes, I know, Arduinos are lame. But... they are incredibly handy for getting certain things done really quickly.→InsertImageFor the control system we need to emulate a USB keyboard, it just so happens the Arduino Micro is especially good at this....
Now we couldn't very well let 500 hackers mess around with a bunch of open wires, so we needed to make a little enclosure for our control system. The simplest way to do this was to grab an off the shelf project enclosure from Radioshack.→InsertImageWe...
rev3 board, rerouted and moved components around to try to be closer to final design and clean up noise, split ground planes.Changed SPI's to use the hardware SPIs of the Cortex, they were all Software SPI before, adding all the names to the pins on...
Arko started putting the rev3 board together last night, we usually build the power section first and measure how it looks, make sure none of the power is shorted in the PCB ( it happens). This board has one always on regulator, its a 3.3V LDO that...
Terrible cell phone pic, the 1.3" 128x96 OLED SSD1306 is a direct drop in replacement for the 0.96". Though it is $5.00 vs $2.57 , I do like the bigger display . I'll hopefully take a better pic of it, certainly couldn't take a worse one....
It's wildfire season, but Fedex managed to get our boards from Malaysia to us in good time, unfortunately there was a cock up in the ordering department and they shipped to the billing address, we'd left there about 15 minutes before they showed up with...
Recently I'd gotten a fair bit of interest from folks wanting to buy or or trade for one of these FPGA boards...And I must admit, I'm not terribly capitalistic when it comes to stuff I build outside of the work context (I often find I just end up giving...