Since my wheels are an ex armed police car, this came with several pros and cons. While it has been very well maintained and has a number of upgrades like air suspension and a sporty engine map, downsides are that it has no entertainment system and holes in the roof where the antennas and lights were mounted. The holes have been covered with some trusty duct tape for the last couple of years, but I figured that while we are in lockdown, and I don’t need to drive daily, it was about time to fix them properly.

The lockdown has put real world racing on hold but a number of world class drivers from F1, touring cars, rally and more have embraced sim driving. Along with some half decent commentary it makes for some fun racing with the mix of styles and lots of action.

Pretty entertaining and worth taking a watch.

Recently I have been watching the Formula E motor racing championship. It has some exciting street track racing helped by interesting features like attack mode and fanboost, showing off electric technology and you will recognise some of the drivers from F1 or DTM.

The season starts in November on Eurosports but the last one is available on catchup. Check it out https://www.fiaformulae.com

Tada. I’m happy to unveil my all new revamped blog built using the Hugo static site generator. Hopefully this will be the start of a flurry of new posts, but just as likely see you in a year or so for the next post. ;)

We recently did some team-building at work featuring off road segways, rekindling my desires to get/make one. The offical ones are a bit too pricey at £4k last time I looked!

This DIY Segway shows that they can be put together for a lot less though and although this one is more suited to the tarmac it is some good inspiration.

DIY Segway

via Hackaday - DIY Segway recycles broken electric scooters

My UAV needs to be quite big to stabley carry a payload of 1-2Kg. This thing weighs 8-10Kg and can carry another 4-6Kg!

Unfortunately it does seem to have some slight design flaws in that the fans all rotate in the same direction. Really you want opposing pairs in order to cancel out the gyroscopic rotation effect. Plus I think that you can get more thrust if the fans are below the motors rather than blowing across them.

So I’ve had a very busy run of weekends, not leaving much time for hackery. Looks like Ben Heck has beaten me to the punch in modding a carousel. He connected his to an xbox 360. As well as spurring me on this has given me some good tips of how to do it.

The Ben Heck Show - A Real Game Changer via Hackaday - Xbox 360 DVD changer is the ultimate in gaming laziness

One summer day at Uni, Schwar turned up with a rocket with a camera in it. We had a great time launching it a few times (and subsequently trying to find and get to where it landed).Unfortunately we never got any decent pictures from it but I like to think it would have looked something like this…via Laughing Squid - Videos Shot From Cameras Mounted on the Tips of Fireworks

Before the advent of the mp3 the best way to have all your music on demand was to own a CD carousel like this. One of my friends had one at the time which lead me to the idea of replacing the CD player for one that read DVDs. However DivX/MPG4 and large harddrives rendered that idea a bit redundant before I had a chance to put it into practice. Since Blu-ray has stepped up the required storage size, added to the annoyance of copy protection in those and the PS3 game, the idea seems like a good one again.

coming