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This Portable Car Alternator Charging System from The Back Shed solves quite a few problems when it comes to portable power. If you have a dead battery and no plug close by to charge it what do you do? Get a boost is one option but if you would like to be self reliant this alternator charging system is a cool idea. It uses a small gas motor to turn a standard vehicle alternator so it can provide a ton of charging current and will last as long as you have gas in the tank. Turns out a big part of the build was adapting the cooling fan to blow in the opposite direction since the motor spun the alternator in the wrong direction when it was all bolted together. “This is my first build of the portable charger. The motor is a Kubota 5.2hp 200cc 4 stroke I bought off ebay a few years back. The alternator is a 75amp 12v Bosch with internal regulator. At the time I had access to a laser cutter, so I lasercut the adapter plate from 3mm mild steel. It worked pretty good, but wasn’t very portable. Since then I’ve mounted the charger to a old trolley, see the photo above. Now its portable.The wheels are from an golf buggy.” |
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Check out this RGB Viking Helmet with LED Mohawk. If you are looking for some attention this is guaranteed to get it. It uses OctoBrite LED boards to make the magic happen Via: Build Lounge “The control box was a pain, but such things usually are. There was barely enough room for the parts and wires I was using…and it turned out that the electret amp was picking up too much supply noise from the LEDs, so I needed to add some RC filters, leaving one capacitor hanging outside the case.”
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Xellers shows us how to build a DIY Spark Gap Tesla Coil in this Instructable. When you are done looking at the Tesla Coil have a look at the DIY CRT he built! “Shoot foot-long bolts of lighting through the air, light fluorescent tubes without wires, and power your other high voltage experiments with the aid of this tabletop-sized Tesla coil! The key to this coil’s performance on such a tight budget is that all of its components are designed to work well together. Using some basic concepts from AC circuit design, the components are matched to perform well without requiring massive amounts of power. Some “coilers” use microwave oven transformers to pump kilowatts of energy through poorly matched circuits, resulting in large losses and mediocre performance. This instructable will show you how to avoid making such mistakes and how to properly design a spark gap Tesla coil.”
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The prize this week is a solar flashlight, if you want to use this as a flashlight you better charge it during the day and not hidden in a drawer. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:
The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries. ———————————–———- Added September 18, 2011 Sorry for the delay in the winner announcement. The item to guess was Macetech Centipede Shield The winner is Stephen H. (there were 169 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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Our friend Pete Mills sent in his latest project, it’s a DIY Guitar Pickup Winder. There have been quite a few DIY Winders build before but this one automates quite a lot of the steps. “Here is a feature list: -Pickup Winding with turn counting, RPM, ETA and auto stop I decided to use an Arduino to control my guitar pickup winder. I figured it would be a good way to put it into use. I bought the thing years ago and have only used it a couple of times. It really just gathers (figurative) dust as was the graphic LCD I used here too. I was glad to put some inventory to use in this project.”
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Koen has just completed his 8X8X8 LED Cube which is powered by an Arduino. This is a really impressive looking build! “I finished my latest project. I wanted to build a led cube. It had to be big (8x8x8) and easy to build! I found a way to do it! 32 meter of stainless steel, 128 meter of wire ,8 meters of heat shrink, 8 max7219 chips later. It all worked!”
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It seems whatever Apple touches turns to gold. So it doesn’t surprise me when I hear that their products are being copied and great lengths are being taken to get them into the market. But some of the extremes that have been occurring lately are just over the top. The video above shows what looks to be an Apple store in China but as it turned out it was completely fake. The products inside are all fake Apple products inside what is designed to look like a normal Apple store. The video below shows a bust that Chinese police made, the caught a group of people using a 300M zip line to get fake Apple product across a river into Hong Kong for beneficial tax laws. Looks like the zip line was setup from a high-rise building on around the 16th floor over to a 3 story building on the other side of the river. Not sure how they didn’t think the heavy black cable would not been spotted.
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I am thinking that the housing could make for a very small surface mount project. Not sure if the solar cell would have enough power to energize a very low current circuit but I would think it should. This contest will run for one week (September 3 – 9, 2011). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above.
