Worldwide Cycling Atlas produced this excellent video about Maya Pedal Asociación, a Guatemalan organization which has been repurposing bicycles into machines since 1997. Created because of the expense and scarcity of electricity in the municipality of San Andrés Itzapa, their Bicimáquinas are pedal-powered pumps, blenders, threshing machines, and washing machines. They’re doing great work and […]
MAKE pal Dino Segovis brings us this handy tutorial on running a stepper motor in “reverse,” i.e. turning the shaft mechanically in order to generate electrical power, instead of the normal usage. He writes: Any electric motor will also output a voltage when it’s freely spinning. Stepper motors are much better at this because they […]
This colorful bike rack made from old bike frames was spotted in New York City by a BikeHacks reader. According to him, they were made by a local metal fabricator in Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. What an excellent way to put scrap frames to good use!
Mounting a digital drum controller on an exercise bike may seem silly, at first, but personally I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. It makes what used to a be a tedious chore into something joyous—more like dancing or marching in a drum line than “working out.” To use […]
Yet another reason to own a stainless steel car. An “insane amount of time,” but the results are undeniably stunning; check out more pics in this thread at autopia.org. Rob Beschizza found that it’s been done at least once before.
A short film about Bill Holloway and Mauro Hernandez, of Masterworks Woodworking who “salvage condemned city trees, then build beautiful bicycles out of them.”
Wannes Vermeulen created an iPad app to control a modded RC car, complete with a remote point-of-view camera: I used two servo motors attached to the original remote control of the car to adjust speed and steering. These are controlled by an Arduino Uno, which gets the accelerometer data from the iPad through a socket server on my laptop. I also fitted my old Android smartphone to the car, which uses an IPCam app to stream the video to the iPad. The “camera”, the iPad and the laptop are connected to the same Wi-Fi network to share their data.
