Welcome to my Summer Of Projects! I have a lot of CNC and miscellaneous geek projects that I never made time for this past winter. I bought most of the parts but didn't do much in the way of assembly. I've gotten mostly caught up on my work (self employed, no real end in sight), and I built the CNC router kit last week and I'm wiring the panel now - simple LinuxCNC with parallel port stepper motor control. Then I'll finish the backyard shed so I can move enough junk out of the basement so I can build the 2' X 5' laser. Then finish the CNC lathe conversion (servos with MESA interface), then the CNC milling machine (big honkin' steppers). Then maybe finish the two Ordbot Hadron 3D printers.
But after that, maybe this fall if all goes well, I can build my solar powered electric Libertymobile. The goal is to have around town transportation for one that maximizes my transportation liberty. No gas to buy. No oil changes. No increased electric bills. Very simple and inexpensive maintenance. It's Bicycle Repairman! And best of all, it'll be designed to barely squeak in under the limit so it's not a motorcycle. Legally, it'll be a bicycle or scooter. No driver's license. No registration. No property taxes. No title. No license plate. No insurance. In my head, it's a three wheel recumbent design with a fiberglass/graphite and foam composite construction, with a removable canopy for minimal drag and weather protection. Probably three wheel drive. Maybe independent two wheel drive for simplicity, with firmware traction control and no need for a universal joint or constant velocity joints. I kicked around the idea of controlling it with LinuxCNC for a lark, but I'll almost certainly use a PIC microcontroller and full custom electronics, with a serial LCD for the minimalist data output. Probably a keypad for keyless access control. I haven't done any PIC programming in half a decade, seems like forever, but I wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of PIC code prior to that, so I'm hoping it'll all come flooding back into my old geek brain. Most of the user interface will be a side stick input to the PIC and a stand alone Garmin GPS for the navigation and speedometer. An Arduino would probably be the best way to control it today if I wanted to make it easy for others to hack in my footsteps, but this is a one off project so I'll use the tools that I know... or at least knew before losing my geek mojo. To put the project in terms that Andy might appreciate... it's sort of like the noncommercial version of the Sinclair C5, with styling that's less reminiscent of Space 1999. It's a much less complicated and less expensive project than Jon's all-electric Honda Civic concept. Hey Jon! I'll see your holy VW bug and raise you the first vehicle I owned, an Audi 100LS with a rusted out floor that was a lot like driving a glass bottom boat. I could watch the highway roll by underneath. That was handy. It had no brakes, so I could look down and see who I had run over. It had no windshield wipers either. It soon had a milk crate for a passenger seat and a pile-o-junk where the back seat had been. I should have stuck to bicycling. On 05/01/2013 01:18 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > Well, this is pretty off-topic, except that these machines are basically > big servo motors and drives. I have a Honda Civic hybrid and have > driven it for about 4 years. I just had to have the hybrid battery > replaced at Honda's cost this winter. I get 49 MPG in the winter > and hot summer, and am getting 57 MPG right now, in mixed > city/highway driving. I fill the gas tank a bit more than once a month! > > I could actually use an all-electric for all this, but then I'm going to > Wichita in June, so an all-electric might be less optimal for that > trip. > > (I did build an all-electric VW Beetle hack job in 1985 or > so, and it ran remarkably well. The body was full of > big holes, though.) > > Jon > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
