If the motor mount is hackable with reasonable effort, and the motor controller’s interfaces are open, then in principle… yes.

Yet in reality, companies build extremely complicated cars where premature failure of multiple components can successfully sabotage the whole. :(

I’ve once needed to repair a Mitsubishi EV motor controller. It took 2 days to dismantle. Schematics were far beyond my skill of reading electronics, and I build model planes as an everyday hobby, so I’ve seen electronics. Replacement of the high voltage comparator was impossible as nobody was selling it separately. The repair shop wanted to replace the entire motor controller (5000 €). Some guy from Sweden had figured out a fix: a 50 cent resistor. But installing it and putting things back was not fun at all. It wasn’t designed to be repaired.

Needless to say, replacing a headlight bulb on the same car requires removing the front plastic cover, starting from the wheel wells, undoing six bolts, taking out the front lantern, and then you can replace the bulb. I curse them. :P

But it drives. Hopefully long enough so I can get my own car built from scratch.

Thanks for the news, but also - thanks for posting a proper summary. :)

(So many videos have only the YouTube-compiled summary, which is typically totally off topic.)

Nice to hear. :) The process seems doable in a suitably equipped factory. :)

The transfer to electricity could be done by using the heated mass to heat a hot pumped liquid or using transfer rods made of a solid material with a high heat transfer coefficient.

Alternatively, heat can be extracted by pumping liquid metal (sodium, tin, low-temperature eutectic alloys) in a pipework of copper (if there is chemical compatibility with copper). But handling liquid metal with a magnetic pump isn’t typically done on the DIY tech level.

To be honest, I tried a fair number of experiments on the subject, including low-temperature Stirling motors. They’re difficult to build well. I would recommend plain old steam turbine. Steam means pressure, pressure means precautions (risk of bursting, risk of getting burned), but modern approaches to boilers try to minimize the amount of water in the system, so it couldn’t flash to steam and explode.

I have superficially researched both options (with the conclusion that I cannot use either, since my installation would be too small, and would suffer from severe heat loss due to an unfavourable volume-to-surface ratio - it makes sense to design thermal stores for a city or neighbourhood, not a household).

I’d add a few notes:

1. A thermal store using silicate sand is not limited by the melting point of the sand, but the structural strength of the materials holding the sand. You can count on stainless steel up to approximately 600 C, more if you design with reserve strength and good understanding of thermal expansion/contraction. Definitely don’t count on anything above 1000 C or forget the word “cheap”. I have read about some folks designing a super-hot thermal store, but they plan to heat graphite (self-supporting solid material) in an inert gas environment.

2. Heat loss intensifies with higher temperatures, and the primary type of heat loss becomes radiative loss. Basically, stuff starts glowing. For example, the thermal conductivity of stone wool can be 0.04 W / mK at 10 C, and 0.18 W / mK at 600 C.

3. Water can be kept liquid beyond 100 C. The most recent thermal stores in Finland are about 100 meters below surface, where the pressure of the liquid column allows heating water to 140 C.

4. However, any plan of co-generation (making some electricity while extracting the stored heat) requires solid materials and high temperatures.

I played the idea a few years back, at some anarchist-leaning not-just-music festival. We tried setting up a link over a 70 m hill, both stations using 433 MHz (500 mW transmit power, quarter wave antennas) narrowband (no frequency hopping) LoRa boards from Chengdu EByte. Stick antennas, not directional. Both stations were right below the hillside, so the hill formed a perfect obstacle between them.

Communicating over the hill in a single hop proved impossible. With a repeater at the hilltop, it was possible to make contact with the repeater from street level (no line of sight, trees obstructing), but the repeater (Meshtastic didn’t exist back then, it was entirely homebrew) had software bugs, so - no link to the other hillside. :)

With better software and better planning, the experiment would have succeeded. :) And if we’d have tried building a link over a valley, it would have been considerably easier.

With ordinary WiFi and directional antennas (panel or ladder antennas), I’ve been able to establish links over 1 km. If one used a LoRa card, and had a directional antenna for the frequency involved, in clear line of sight, I believe 10 km would be attainable without being a radio specialist.

Coincidentally, there’s a cheaper way too. :)

The ratings of existing power lines can be recalculated on an hourly basis according to outdoor temperature and wind.

That however, requires software and agility, which big companies seldom have… and it doesn’t help during a heat wave with no wind, of course.

Poleward winds, which previously made few inroads into the atmosphere above Antarctica, are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia. Exactly why these currents are now able to plunge so deep into the continent’s air space is not yet clear, however.

Even if they cannot explain the “how”, it seems beyond doubt that the process can happen repeatedly.

When it happens repeatedly, one should plan for faster Antarcic ice loss, since the excess heat of the rest of the planet can now increasingly reach and melt glaciers.

That has implications for coastal regions everywhere on the planet. Don’t build on the coast. Make plans for higher storm surges and sea level rise. And - needless to say - don’t add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

That was some interesting reading, thank you. :)

About the Little Ice Age - I feel like the article slightly mis-dates the period, placing it earlier than many sources suggest.

As a side note, human-amplified mechanisms have been proposed to the Little Ice Age, aside from natural ones - from the conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors, to the Black Death, to the smallpox epidemic that Europeans brought into Americas… but the likely trigger, I think, was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1257_Samalas_eruption

As for human societies taking different turns when facing difficulty - I would search for the cause in their world views, technologies and interactions. Europe had already put itself on a course to technical sophistication - techniques such as writing, number systems and methods of calculation enable a single ruler to boss around more people, and ever since the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Chinese invented their versions, they had big bosses claiming divine mandate or origin.

Everywhere in Eurasia, people also rode and transported cargo - horses, camels and elephants were used to transport goods and fight wars. Their existence enabled the use of wagons and carts, which enabled winches and cranes, siege engines, windmills, sawmills and watermills, to the point of having technology to equip armies and fleets…

…and indeed, armies and fleets were a common problem everywhere in Eurasia. Some where Christian, some Islamic, some believed their own flavour of stories, but the elite having access to writing (without the common people having the same) enabled spread of ideology and top-down management.

Genghis Khan added a key component - an efficient postal system. This enabled remote control of and fast-moving armies, allowing to manage supply chains, give strategic input to distant generals and subsequently - conquer pretty much the known world.

He was not unique, though - Arab armies did a similar trick earlier, Europeans repeated the nasty trick later, enabled by technology from China (gunpowder, printing and compass)… the Ottoman empire grew between the two and took a bite of both, then Russia conquered Eurasia in reverse and Western kingdoms colonized the coasts of many seas.

Eurasia was a considerably more fast-paced, violent and top-down place indeed, and the pace and violence probably had a role in shaping the thought landscape.

“You have to go measure things in the real world, because nature surprises you,” Keith said at that conference in 2017.

He has continually stressed that the amount of material involved would represent a small fraction of the particulate pollution already emitted by planes, and that doing the same experiment for any other scientific purpose wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

I agree with that. It seems overblown that some folks were opposed to spreading two kilograms of limestone dust and measuring the result.

A single aerobatic flight of an ultralight aircraft with a smoke trail probably requires more pyrotechnical material, not to speak of fuel. Not to speak of a proper passenger or cargo flight. Not to speak of a satellite launch.

People already do the things anyway, only without properly understanding the results.

As for the argument that “then everyone will start experimenting” - well, that depends on the result of the previous expriment, does it not? And some do it anyway. China has a weather modification bureau, Saudi Arabia practises cloud seeding to increase chances of rainfall, etc.

That is quite a lot of interesting experiments, thanks for introducing. :)

I’m inclined to add one more:

51: monitor the radio spectrum for drones (and if their signature looks hostile, warn people about them) - there’s a DIY recipe for a monitoring station out there somewhere, and some Ukrainian guys scan their sky using HackRF

SDR is definitely a technology worth learning. I’m already a happy user of RTL-SDR, but if I want to really see what my WiFi is doing, I should get a HackRF eventually too. (Note: WiFi is too fast to intercept without loss, except with another WiFi card, unless a slower bitrate is deliberately chosen.)

It looks beautiful, but a bit fragile - I’m not used to seeing wooden wings and a jet turbine. :)

I would feel more confident with a propeller-electric rebuild of Antonov An-2 “crop duster”. Which sadly doesn’t exist. :( Someone has to do it, or do a similar thing. :)

Thanks for the advance warning, I hope it goes well. :)

Just wait for the zombie engine. :D

The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.

However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I’ve looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in efficiency - because the efficiency of a motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.

I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)

An exercise in game theory:

• first protester: blocks the road personally
• state: sends the protester to jail
• second protester: drops caltrops, hopefully on a slow-driving road
• state: huffs and puffs, but won’t find the person

That wouldn’t be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It’s short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.

I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal “you shouldn’t get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest”.

If the approximate weight of an 18650 cell is 50 grams, 8000 of them would indeed be 400 kg. Probably more, since they must be packaged somehow. But the pack can be split into modules which a one person can haul around somehow.

Myself, I went for 45 km/h officially (unoffially, on a flat road, I could reach 53 km/h). While turning, for safety reasons, I limited myself to far lower speeds (25 km/h).

Designing a car suspension system for reasonably high speed seems hard, I have never tried, instead choosing the robust and crude solutions to get a reasonable assurance of strength.

Motorcycles seem easier. Especially since most of factory-made motorcycles use a sprocket and chain - a very flexible system for dropping in other power sources. I imagine that with enough know-how to get through type certification, a lot of combustion bikes could become e-bikes with excellent riding characteristics. :)

Yep. I’ve done an L2e, and some day I will manage an L7e. :)

Interference testing was not needed. The motor wattage and motor controller wattage labels were examined. I could have dropped in more power in a mood for forgery, but I was in an honest mood. :)

What I see on his photos are at least 2 (third one likely in reverse, where his finger is pointing) reasonably powerful electric motors on a single toothed belt pair of toothed belts.

image

I think there’s no combustion engine left in that car. I suspect he combined them because the van wouldn’t ride well with only 10 KW.