If you want to know when the train is coming, you could pull up a webpage on your phone, or walk all the way to the station to look at the displays there. Or, like [eastfamilyreddish], you could build a neat little train info display to decorate your desktop instead. The build is based on […]
You know those old cliche that the younger generations have begun to cynically despise: “follow your dreams!” “You can be anything you put your mind to!” — well, perhaps they are true on occasion. For instance when [rctestflight] had PCBs that dreamed of becoming a hydrofoil, he found a way to make that dream come […]
One of the hardest things about owning a classic car is finding replacement parts. Especially if the car is particularly old or rare, or if the parent company is now out of business, sometimes this can be literally impossible and a new part will have to be manufactured from scratch. The same is true of […]
Have you ever wondered what goes into making it possible to use the restroom at 30,000 feet (10,000 m)? [Jason Torchinsky] at the Autopian recently gave us an interesting look at the history of the loftiest of loos. The first airline toilets were little more than buckets behind a curtain, but eventually the joys of […]
Changing the pads on your car’s brakes is a pretty straightforward and inexpensive process on most vehicles. However, many modern vehicles having electronic parking brakes giving manufacturers a new avenue to paywall simple DIY repairs. Most EVs will rarely, if ever, need to replace their mechanical brake pads as in most driving situations the car […]
Ever get to the train station on time, find your platform, and then stare at the board showing your train is 20 minutes late? Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) may run like clockwork most days, but a heads-up before you leave the house is always nice. That’s exactly what [filbot] built: a real-time arrival display […]
History is full of engineers making (or attempting to make) things out of the wrong stuff, from massive wooden aircraft to boats made of ice and sawdust. [PeterSripol] is attempting to make an ultralight aircraft out of a rather wrong material: cardboard. In the previous installment of the project, a pair of wings was fabricated. […]
While it sounds like the start of a joke, Australian shipmaker Incat Tasmania isn’t kidding around about electric ships. Hull 096 has started charging, although it has only 85% of the over 5,000 lithium-ion batteries it will have when complete. The ship has a 40 megawatt-hour storage system with 12 banks of batteries, each consisting […]
If you haven’t lived underneath a rock for the past decade or so, you will have seen a lot of arguing in the media by prominent figures and their respective fanbases about what the right sensor package is for autonomous vehicles, or ‘self-driving cars’ in popular parlance. As the task here is to effectively replicate […]
Full marks for clarity of message. Credit: Euro Route materials When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have taken a very different turn. Among the competing proposals for a fixed Channel […]