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Charge like you Volt-to: DIY J1772

DIY Electric Car

I have a dirty secret, I like free stuff and I think you do too. Lately I find myself charged on public charging. No, I technically rarely "have-to" use the thin boxes popping up all over town. I've had facility folks come over twice now to tell me, "Those spaces aren't open!"

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Chevy Launches New Site for Volt

DIY Electric Car

Chevrolet recently launched an information and social networking site for their upcoming Electric Vehicle, the Volt. It seems to be just getting started but looks to be the best way (besides DIY Electric Car, of course), to get current information on the Volt. The site is www.chevroletvoltage.com

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DIY Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy with a Raspberry Pi Pico

Cars That Think

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.”.

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Search for Buried Treasure With This DIY Magnetometer

Cars That Think

But feeding it to a second op amp configured as a simple comparator (one that compares the input with zero volts) squared the signal up nicely, with the output switching between the +12-volt and –12-volt supply rails every 3 milliseconds or so. This article appears in the May 2022 print issue as “A DIY Magnetometer.”.

DIY 98
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A DIY E-bike Conversion on the Cheap

Cars That Think

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. Being an open-source design no doubt keeps the price of this hardware down: The controller I bought set me back a mere $85. The third essential element of any e-bike is, of course, the battery.

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A Web-Enabled, High Quality, DIY Audio Amp

Cars That Think

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.

DIY 100
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This Huge DIY Workbench Gives You a Hand

Cars That Think

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?

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