Building DIY Volt 
Cars That Think
MARCH 24, 2022
So, I set about building an open-source ice tracker from DIY components that not only proved to be much, much cheaper but also much more capable than the commercial options. This consumed around 350 milliamperes while running at 5 volts for about 1.7 watts, but the Apollo3 uses just 500 microamperes at 3.3 microwatts.
Cars That Think
AUGUST 20, 2021
At the time, e-bikes were still rather exotic, at least in the United States, so it seemed worth the expense and effort to build my own. 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. In 2009, I wrote in these pages about my efforts to.
DIY Electric Car
SEPTEMBER 3, 2011
So with a little wire, some basic skills and one stupidly expensive receptacle, you can build a J1772 to NEMA L6-30R adapter for yourself. I took the car to the nearest charging station and tested it at full power today. It says I pulled 3.51 Pin 4 -->| --[1kw] - Pin 3 (Ground). Drive however you want, but charge safe!
Cars That Think
AUGUST 20, 2021
At the time, e-bikes were still rather exotic, at least in the United States, so it seemed worth the expense and effort to build my own. 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. In 2009, I wrote in these pages about my efforts to.
Cars That Think
SEPTEMBER 27, 2023
Searching the interwebs, I found no shortage of leads about how to build a DIY seismometer. The problem is that the DIY seismometer designs I was seeing were large and ungainly contraptions. I wondered whether I could build a more compact one using a geophone. I recently decided that I needed to give this a try.
Cars That Think
APRIL 26, 2022
The notion of being led to a hidden object by virtue of the magnetic anomaly it creates must have really intrigued my 9-year-old self, because a decade after seeing that movie I decided to build a circuit to measure the strength of Earth’s magnetic field. This article appears in the May 2022 print issue as “A DIY Magnetometer.”.
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. I wanted to see if I could make it easy and affordable to build a spectrometer.
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