Investigating parking assist sensors

While his wife was out-of-town [James] jumped at the opportunity to do some snooping around with her Chevy Tahoe’s parking assist sensors. We can understand how pulling parts out of someone’s car would make them none too happy. But we find it hilarious that it’s a leased company car he’s tinkering around with. But we’re glad he did, the ten-page write-up he published about the project is a fascinating read.

You can see the control board above which is housed beneath the passenger seat. It uses a Freescale microcontroller to read from the four bumper-mounted ultrasonic sensors. But just looking at what parts are used obviously isn’t enough to satisfy a hacker’s appetite for knowledge. [James] busted out a CAN bus tool to sniff the data packets. These sensors use a custom chip designed by GM, utilizing a single wire communications system. He figures out the communication scheme and builds an mbed based test rig to read them directly.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Backyard ski lift

If you own a cabin in the mountains of British Columbia what do you do during the warmer summer months? Well, we’d probably mix of a cocktail and string up a hammock, but [Darrin] is quite a bit more motivated. He planned for the snowy season by building his own ski lift. He shared the details in a forum post, but you’re going to have to register and wait for approval before you can view that thread. Perhaps you’ll want to look at the video after the break before making that kind of commitment. Normally we would just pass over projects that require a login to view, but this one deserves the attention.

The setup is essentially a very steep tow rope. 1600 feet of 1/8″ aircraft cable covers an 800 foot span of his property. Apparently he’s got a total of 1000 feet of vertical drop but the lift doesn’t cover the whole area quite yet. That 6.5 horsepower Honda engine drives the cable loop, with the pulley system seen above used as an RPM reducer. Each skier can hook onto the cable used the nylon rope with a ski-pole spacer and a hook. The RC vehicle remote control works as a dead man’s switch, starting the lift slowly when the throttle is depressed and stopping it when released.

Normally we like to link to similar projects, but so far this is the only ski lift we’ve covered. You’ll have to settle for this ski-pole mounted POV display.

[Read more…]

Build an electric motorcycle

On the list of things we’ll build ‘when we get a few free weekends,’ an electric motorcycle is right at the top. With a 20-mile range, they may not be as  versatile as a car or truck, but we can’t imagine a vehicle better suited for making a quick jaunt around town. [Ben Nelson] just finished his electric motorcycle and put up a great Instructable on converting an ’81 Kawasaki KZ440 to battery power.

After going over the rarely mentioned aspects of license, registration, and insurance, [Ben] started his build by pulling the engine from his bike and installing an electric motor. The batteries used weren’t insanely expensive LiPo cells, but instead cheap lead-acid units. The calculated range with the lead-acid batteries was 26 miles – perfect for a trip to the next town over and back.

After everything was cabled up, chain wrapped around sockets, and an awesome yellow paint job applied, [Ben] finally took his bike for a test drive. Check out the videos after the break for an idea of how fast [Ben]’s bike can go.

[Read more…]

Suzuki V-Strom current gear indicator

[Iron Jungle] just finished building this gear indicator for his motorcycle. It uses a red 7-segment display to show the rider what gear is currently engaged. This hack is pretty common and makes us wonder why all motorcycles don’t come standard with the feature? But then again, if they did you wouldn’t have a reason to hack them.

The motorcycle does have a gear sensor; apparently it only lacks a way to display this data. The sensor outputs a signal between 0 and 5V which [Iron Jungle] reads using a PICAXE 18M2 microcontroller. Patching into that signal wasn’t hard at all. Once he found the correct wire he simply removed a portion of the insulation and soldered a lead to the conductor. This should stand up to the vibrations encountered in an automotive application like this one. Since the computing power is already there, he also included a DS18B20 to take ambient air temperature readings. Check out the quick demo after the break.

This is not the first time we’ve seen the V-Storm get a custom gear indicator. But if you really want to go all out, perhaps you need to build an interface for your tablet or smart phone. [Read more…]