This is a pretty cool article describing some of the up-till-now secret sauce on the electric motorcycle project I've been working on with Chip Yates for the last few months. The article describes the front-wheel Kinetic Energy Recovery System that Chip designed in great detail. It has some cool pictures of the bike, and an awesome video that someone (ahem, yours truly) put together for the bike unveiling a few weeks ago.
Recently I bought a (very) used Dyson DC16 handheld vacuum on Ebay for my office. I got a great deal on the vacuum because it came without a charger and needed some new seals and filters. I thought I would be able to use one of the other Dyson chargers we have kicking around the house, but alas it looks like nearly every Dyson line has a unique (if very similar looking) charger. In the case of the DC16, it annoyingly doesn’t have a DC barrel jack, but uses a charging cradle that interfaces to two contacts on the bottom of the vacuum. I thought about buying a charger from Eba...
As with many folks over the last year, I’ve been working from home since the start of the COVID pandemic. I unfortunately didn’t have a webcam back in March for the new world of Zoom meetings, so I hopped on Amazon to find one. Finding one that was in stock at that time and not outrageously expensive was more difficult than I had anticipated and I ended up buying a bare-board USB camera: ELP 2.8-12mm Varifocal Lens Camera. This camera doesn’t have an enclosure or any way to hold it in position. I ended up using some rubber bands to hold it to a miniature Joby tripod that I had hanging arou...
This project grew out of a problem we were running into at Airware. The physical layout of some of the aircraft we were putting our autopilot hardware onto made it difficult to properly terminate our CAN buses at each end. In a normal CAN bus, there all of the nodes are connected on a single bus, which is terminated by a 120Ω resistor at each end. The autopilot we had designed had onboard termination for one end of the CAN bus, and then the other end would be terminated at one of the nodes on the bus. This made it difficult to terminate the bus correctly if the autopilot was not physicall...
This project grew out of a common source of frustration at our office - we have only three toilets for ~70 employees, and there is frequently contention for this scarce resource. There’s nothing worse than patrolling between the three restrooms searching for an open one. A coworker (Eben) and I started brainstorming how we could solve this issue, and an IoT device seemed the obvious solution. During some booze-infused brainstorming sessions, we came up with the architecture for this, and built it.
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