Cars That Think
AUGUST 20, 2021
Here I took advantage of already owning an electric lawnmower, figuring that the 40-volt, 4-ampere-hour battery I had for it would serve well. This article appears in the September 2021 print issue as "An Instant E-bike.". The third essential element of any e-bike is, of course, the battery. As I raced ahead, I chuckled to myself. "OK
Cars That Think
AUGUST 20, 2021
Here I took advantage of already owning an electric lawnmower, figuring that the 40-volt, 4-ampere-hour battery I had for it would serve well. This article appears in the September 2021 print issue as "An Instant E-bike.". The third essential element of any e-bike is, of course, the battery. As I raced ahead, I chuckled to myself. "OK
Clean Fleet Report
MARCH 14, 2023
Tech: How to Troubleshoot Electrical Issues Tips for Diagnosing Power Issues in your Car This article may contain affiliate links. Although you can have an approximate gauge of the issue yourself, it does not necessarily mean you can take the DIY route. With the engine turned off, the multimeter should read 12 to 13 volts.
Cars That Think
APRIL 26, 2022
So I read some World War II–era journal articles and learned about the magnetometers used to locate submerged German submarines. This article appears in the May 2022 print issue as “A DIY Magnetometer.”. With that information, I constructed what’s called a fluxgate magnetometer. It was crude, but it worked.
Cars That Think
JUNE 22, 2022
So when I decided to build a cheap DIY scintillating gamma spectrometer, it was the natural choice—although I didn’t realize I’d find myself navigating around teething problems of the sort that often affect a first-generation integrated circuit. This article appears in the July 2022 print issue as “DIY Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy.”.
Cars That Think
FEBRUARY 25, 2022
November 2018 Hands On article, “DIY Pro Audio ” in IEEE Spectrum , and it convinced me it was possible, although I wanted to go beyond just a power amplifier to something more like my lamented Sansui. In commercial product development, an optimized microcontroller would be the way to go, but for my DIY project, a Pi was perfect.
Cars That Think
JULY 21, 2021
I added a DIY solder squid—a block with four flexible arms that I use to hold components in place while soldering—with a concrete base and an automatic solder fume extractor. I did just that, pulling out a strip of 12-volt nonaddressable LEDs and powering them with a simple wall power adapter. James Provost. But why stop there?
Expert insights. Personalized for you.
145 
Let's personalize your content