We live in a veritable Cambrian Explosion of camping options, ranging from a tarp on the ground to multi-million dollar RVs. Somewhere around the middle is the pop-up truck camper, but [Further Fabrication] wanted to build his own.

As is often the case, he saw the cool pop-up truck campers on the market, but balked at the cost. To make matters worse, the options out there weren’t really available in his country. After getting a solid set of measurements from the truck and some materials, he set to work.

The most interesting part of this build is probably the aluminum/plywood sandwich [Further Fabrication] chose for building the main structure of the camper shell. While many would’ve chosen a tubing space frame for the build, he decided to sandwich two layers of plywood around plywood beams and large rectangular aluminum tubing. These were affixed with a combination of construction adhesive and screws to create a lightweight yet sturdy enclosure.

The tent portion uses a 600-denier PVC-coated waterproof polyester fabric, sewn with nice YKK zippers, and features large windows with screens for excellent ventilation. The roof consists of two sections of aluminum composite sandwich, and the side panels were made from cutoffs of the roof material. Instead of the standard cam-lock used on most camper shells, [Further Fabrication] chose a solenoid-actuated system and more conventional grab handles.

We’ve covered campers several times, including a solar-powered RV, a truck camper that expands lengthwise rather than up, and several bike-based campers.

[Pedro Neves] has a mid-drive e-bike, but he doesn’t own it — not truly, since he can’t repair the motor unit. For a hacker to be in that position, there are only two options: crack the old one and make it your own, or build your own from scratch. [Pedro] built his own and is open-sourcing it on his website for everyone to play with. Right now, that’s .step files and a BOM, so you’ll need to watch the design/build video on YouTube below to get the full picture.

His choice of a motor from an old battery-powered angle grinder is both thrifty and environmentally friendly, so we approve. His goal of 25 km/h seems like a reasonable speed limit, but may still be too fast for some countries’ regulations— so do check the local rules if you’re going to build this. Making the most of 3D-printed components is also a choice that makes the project more accessible, but don’t worry — the bearing surfaces are all metal. That includes the clutch bearing that will let you pedal home if the battery dies or the motor craps out. Well, unless the printed plastic axle gives up the ghost, but that got replaced with a CNC version, so it’s all good. Unless you’ve got legs like Hercules, it ought to hold.

If that’s not DIY enough, you could always build the motor yourself. This mid-drive is also part of a larger project [Pedro] is working on for a whole cargo bike, as he details in his video, which is a worthy project we’ve seen other examples of before.

Railroads might be a nineteenth century technology, but they’re still the backbone of cargo transportation in the 21st century. They’ve also far from run out of innovation, including this one which really just sounds like a hack: painting the rails white to beat the heat.

In the old days, when rails were short and riveted together, this might have been unecesssary; all those joints allowed for a lot of flex. But when you have kilometers of continously welded rail, the thermal expansion starts to matter. A lot. Even if the rails haven’t bent and buckled from excess heat, their capacity goes down. Trains must therefore slow way, way down in hot weather, reducing the overall amount of freight the system can handle.

So, how do you cool the million miles of metal that holds a country together? Paint. Simple white paint sprayed on the side of the rails can bring down temperatures 11 °C (20 °F), according to the Union Pacific Railroad, the first to try this in North America. It might not surprise you that this technique is also being rolled out on the other side of the pond during this summer’s European heat waves. Indeed, it was invented there; the Italians have been doing it for many years now.

If you think reducing solar heat with white paint is good, you can do better than that with special formulations that end up cooler than ambient. It passive cooling also comes in fibre form.

Online publications sometimes work with sponsors. Over at the Autopian, they landed a sponsorship deal with eBay, but due to an unguarded comment, fulfilling the sponsor’s requirements turned out to be something of a handful. Build a brand-new, completely WW2-spec Jeep using only parts sourced from the auction site, and drive it to Moab for an event. [David Tracy] set to work, and the resulting write-up is a build of epic proportions.

Of course, many Jeeps have been built since the war, not least by Willys and its successors, but also by enthusiasts. You can even buy a modern-day visible derivative of the original made in America by the Indian company Mahindra, which has been licensed to build Jeeps since the 1940s. So his claim of making the first new WW2-spec Jeep since the war may be difficult to substantiate, but it’s certain that his attention to period detail is exceptional. For example, most people would either use a more modern engine or find a second-hand original. Instead, he sources a brand new block from France and builds a new engine from scratch. And is that the infamously flawed early Jeep steering system we spy? The vehicle uses second-hand parts for other major drive train components, but the chassis and body are made in the Philippines.

An early Jeep is a simple vehicle, but following his build, you realise the power of the manufacturing industry, as so many individual parts and assemblies must come together to make the finished machine. Some of us have had old cars in our lives, so we appreciate this very well. The moment of completion comes with very little testing time to spare, and he’s off on the long drive from LA to Moab. That in itself could make an epic write-up, and yet again, we recognise the combination of willpower and worry. All of this has made us idly want one of these wildly impractical but seductive vehicles, but we know it will pass. If you aren’t interested in authenticity, you can always meld a Jeep with a Prius.

Though [Ivan Miranda] calls the 3D printed vehicle in his recent video a motorbike, what he ultimately pulls out of his suitcase is clearly a scooter. Linguistic confusion aside, the “Mirandetta” looks like an awesome build and pulling a scooter out of your suitcase and whizzing past everyone in the taxi line just sounds amazing, especially knowing you made it yourself.

Aside from a whole lot of filament, he’s got a couple of tool batteries for hot-swappable energy that Airport security shouldn’t mind too much — provided you carry them with you, anyway — plus the usual e-bike motor and electronic speed control you might expect, and lawnmower tires which you might not. The narrow 3D printed rims round over the normally-flat tires to make them usable for this application. He seems particularly taken with the bi-stable mechanism he built for the kickstand, and we can’t blame him as we love seeing that kind of thing ourselves. The TPU seat is also a nice touch to keep with ‘everything printed’ vibe.

Now while the finished product does indeed fit into his suitcase, it needs to be completely disassembled. Well, unless you have an over-sized suitcase, perhaps. So our dreams of zooming away from the luggage line from the first paragraph were perhaps a bit premature. Still, from the footage at Prague Maker Faire at the end of the video, it looks like it was a fun enough ride that we can forgive [Ivan] for our overactive imaginations.

If you want an open-source e-bike, we’ve seen those too — but that won’t fit in any kind of suitcase.

We know, we know. Despite being called ESP32-Plane-Radar, this project from [Mateusz Juszczyk] isn’t actually using radar. But thanks to the round LCD this desktop gadget does a fantastic job of recreating a classic radar display, and by pulling in Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) data, the visuals even match nearby real-world aircraft.

Perhaps the best part of this project is just how easy it is for others to get in on the action. Although the presentation certainly looks professional — and expensive, if we’re being honest — there’s nothing particularly exotic going on here. Specifically, there’s ESP32-C3 Super Mini behind the scenes cranking through the ADS-B data and pushing it out to a circular GC9A01 display. A minimalistic 3D printed enclosure holds both components, and while it’s undeniably slick as-is, we can’t help but think there’s potential here for more elaborate designs.

As you probably guessed from the lack of a radio in the parts list, the code [Mateusz] provides doesn’t actually sniff ADS-B out of the air. It connects to the local network over WiFi, and then hits adsb.fi to pull in crowdsourced flight data. Since the device has to connect to the network anyway, the code also offers up a web-based configuration interface which puts a little more polish on what’s already an impressive presentation.

We used a round GC9A01 display on the Vectorscope back in 2023, so if anyone ports this over to their old Supercon badge we’d love to see it in action.

Thanks to [Mauricio] for the tip.

In some parts of Canada, you’ll rarely hear someone use the phrase “whatever paddles your canoe” instead of the more usual “whatever floats your boat”– and apparently, at least for one Swede, that’s steam power. The video, linked and embedded below, is a detailed tour of a canoe equipped with a small boiler and an outboard motor that has been converted to run using steam pressure by [Kenneth Karlsson].

The canoe itself appears to be a Grumman of the “prospector” type, wide in body to hold all the gear you’d need for extended wilderness trips– or, in this case, a small boiler. Amidships is the ideal place, as it won’t affect the balance of the boat. Amidships is an odd place to put an outboard– in the North American homeland of the canoe, if you aren’t moving under your own power, it is more common to cut off the curved stern of the canoe and mount the outboard to the newly-made transom. [Karlsson]’s choice to put the outboard off one side will be less maneuverable than a stern mount, but saves the need to modify the canoe and makes for much shorter steam lines. Shorter steam lines means less hose to potentially leak and scald the occupants, as well as fewer losses, so we can’t really argue with the tradeoffs.

The engine is an old two-stroke outboard that has a single steam cylinder retrofitted to it, along with a heat exchanger to warm up lake water with exhaust steam before it heads the boiler. The water is filtered first, of course, but we do hope the new owner– who posts on YouTube with channel “Steam Canoe” is diligent about cleaning the boiler. It doesn’t look like super high pressure steam, but the vapour phase of water is always something to be respected.

If the potential of scalding steam leaks and boiler explosions put you off, but you still won’t pick up a paddle, canoes can be rigged with sails— or you can just hand the paddle to a robot arm. Though given this is Hackaday, maybe you’d rather skip the canoe and climb aboard the good ship Benchy instead.

Pity the poor Australians. Isolated on a jagged hunk of land far from everywhere else, these industrious people have to take two-legged flights (or more) to reach a great many destinations in the northern hemisphere. It’s expensive, time consuming, and makes planning a trip a complete headache when wars break out around popular hub airports.

One airline is trying to solve this problem. The nation’s flag carrier, Qantas, has been hard at work on Project Sunrise. The goal is to run some of the longest non-stop commercial passenger flights ever, with great effort going into solving the technical and economic challenges involved.

No Stops

When travelling from Australia’s major capital cities, flights to destinations like London, the rest of Europe, or the US, all involve stopovers in intermediate airports along the way. A great many routes stop in Dubai or Qatar, while others transit through Hong Kong, Singapore, or Thailand. The need for stopovers complicates air travel for the passenger, particularly when delays cause missed connections or baggage gets lost from one flight to another. It can also just be tedious—sometimes a stopover can last 10 hours or more, which is an incredibly uncomfortable amount of time to spend in even the nicest airport. The reason behind stopovers is simple enough—the average commercial airliner just doesn’t have the fuel range to haul many hundreds of passengers from Australia to Europe in a single hop.

Qantas has been trying to improve Australia’s passenger airline links for quite some time by finding ways to eliminate these tedious stopovers entirely. Thus was born Project Sunrise, which hoped to find more direct routes between popular world cities and suitable airliners that could fly those routes without stopping.

An early 2019 test flight probed the practicality of flying from New York to Sydney in a single hop. Due to the limitations of contemporary aircraft, sacrifices were made to get the flight over the line. Where the Boeing 787-9 would normally carry up to 280 passengers, the test flight would only haul 40 to save weight, and thus save fuel. No cargo was on board, and the tanks were brimmed to ensure maximum range was available. Even then, the 16,250 km route was considered to be at 115% of the plane’s normal range, and there was only 90 minutes of contingency  when it came to fuel onboard if something went awry. Despite the challenges, the test was a success, and provided useful learnings on how to handle things like crew fatigue on a 19-hour continuous flight.

Qantas was also experimenting with practical revenue services at this time, too. In 2018, the airline had established a direct route from Perth to London, flying the Boeing 787-9 in a 236-seat configuration. Flying the 14,484-kilometer route was just within the practical range of the aircraft. It was a useful route that made travel easier for passengers departing Australia’s west coast, but far from the golden ideal of allowing direct flights to major international destinations from the major capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. The route has also since fell victim to geopolitical strife, as the Iran War shut down large swathes of airspace in early 2026. Qantas was forced to alter its flight paths, which added 30 to 45 minutes to the usual flight time—just enough to tip the route over the practical limitations of the aircraft’s range.

Future Goals

However, the crowing achievement of Project Sunrise is still yet to come. 39% of Australia’s population is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne alone, with both capitals situated on the country’s east coast. It would be most advantageous from a business perspective for these cities to have direct links to major world destinations, and it would benefit the broadest swathe of Qantas’s customer base. Only, the problem comes back to geography, with these two capitals being over 16,000 kilometers from popular destinations like New York and London.

Qantas has risen to the challenge, regardless. The airline challenged both Boeing and Airbus to develop aircraft intended to fly routes from Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, to destinations like New York, London, Cape Town, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. This was later whittled down to a narrower focus on the Sydney to New York and Sydney to London routes. Airbus would come out victorious, with Qantas ordering twelve examples of the Airbus A350-1000ULR. The specially-configured model features an additional rear centre fuel tank and a higher maximum take-off weight in order to fly routes up to 22 hours non-stop, along with a reduced seat configuration serving just 238 passengers. The extra range makes for a huge difference compared to more conventional routes out of Australia, which often pair two flights up to 14 hours each. The extra range of the new aircraft saves passengers both hours of flight time, along with the hours normally spent sitting around on layover in a hub airport along the way.

A typical flight from Sydney to New York or Sydney to London is expected to take 19 to 22 hours. The no-stop nature of the route will enable 99% of Australians to access either destination either direct, or with one-stop—such as by flying in from another major capital on a domestic flight. The flights are expected to run with a higher-than-usual ratio of premium seats, based on the expected demand for these services.

The main thing holding back the new service is aircraft delivery. Production is underway in earnest, with the first A350-1000ULR to be delivered in April 2027. Daily non-stop flights between Sydney and London will begin from October 2027, with tickets to be on sale from February.

Aircraft cabins will be optimized to have more space and amenity to keep passengers comfortable on ultra-long-range routes.

The new Project Sunrise services will be a gamechanger for many people travelling to and from Sydney, and other Australian capitals. It will relieve a major pain point—layovers—that have become a dreaded fact of life for Australians headed far abroad. It will still perhaps be some time before Australians get more direct services to a wider range of destinations, because these new services will have to prove themselves. If the passenger numbers aren’t there, the services won’t make money, and it may not prove worth the hassle to operate these ultra-long-range routes. If, however, convenience truly is king, then there may be much greater investment in this area to link Sydney and Melbourne with more cities directly. The only losers in this case will be the hub airports across the world, which will grow just a little quieter for the loss of Aussie accents in the terminal.

Cheap vehicles are thin on the ground in 2026, but [Andy Didorosi] thinks he has the answer for low-speed applications with an open source kei truck.

Still in the early design phase, [Didorosi] has an old factory in Detroit that has been home to his bus transportation business for the last several years, as well as the Sendpai kei truck project to make the world’s fastest kei truck. His vision is to make an affordable kit car truck that anyone can build in the comfort of their own garage. The current plan includes hub motors, which have so far not made it into any production EVs in the US, likely due to the problem with high unsprung weight.

While making a new vehicle from scratch is difficult, the project is targeting a modest set of capabilities at the beginning. The truck will be eschewing safety for low cost, which is probably fine for low-speed off-road use as a utility vehicle. Safety will of course get more important as speed increases. Once the design is sufficiently nailed down, [Didorosi] hopes to sell fully assembled trucks that are compliant with US Low Speed Vehicle (LSV) requirements. This would allow it on roads with posted speed limits below 35 mph.

Will Mutiny succeed where efforts like OScar, CarBEN, or Wikispeed could not prevail? Only time will tell. We hope they’ll keep the Minimal Motoring Manifesto in mind, and in the meantime, you should check out this kei camper or an EV-swapped kei truck that looks like it runs on a giant drill battery.

The first known use of humans using wind to perform mechanical work with machines dates back to ninth-century Persian windmills. But if we count sailing vessels among those machines, the history goes back to sometime just before the invention of written language. Since then, humans have been sailing everything from the tiniest of Sunfish to the largest of shipping vessels, and even sailing boats like canoes that aren’t typically designed for efficient sailing. For those who already own a canoe, the conversions can be straightforward but often involve drilling into the hull. This homemade conversion kit, on the other hand, requires no drilling at all.

The first, and most obvious, part of the conversion is to add a mast and sail. [Tea]’s primary setup does involve drilling a mast thwart into the gunwales of the canoe, but he also built an alternative setup which clamps to the gunwales and the bow deck instead. The standing lug sail is then hoisted on an unstayed wooden mast. The next major component of the build are a pair of leeboards which also clamp to the gunwales and function like a centerboard, and can be adjusted for one’s preferred amount of weather helm. Rounding out the stern of the boat is a custom-built rudder with a pair of lines in lieu of a tiller which can be positioned anywhere along the length of the boat.

All of the wooden parts of this build were custom-built from common lumber with finishing touches from a router to soften all of the hard edges. Canoe sailing is fairly popular, although without the leeboards these common sailing kits are often meant for downwind sailing only. A complete setup like this turns it into a much more capable craft. Without a canoe as a base vessel to start with, though, a complete sailing vessel can be built from common lumber as well.