Bored of the skiing down mountains? Maybe you should try skiing up them with the Uphill Racer. via Popular Mechanics
A lifelong downhill skier and industrial mechanic/Âmillwright, Jim Maidment was frustrated by the fact that he could pursue his favorite pastime only near a chair lift. “When you’re on a slope, all that energy is free–as long as you’re going in that one direction,” he says. So Maidment hacked together a 6.5-hp generator engine (bought from Costco for $125) with a small, off-the-shelf snowmobile track from Bombardier, inventing a machine he calls the Skizee. He then headed for the mountains to refine his creation, moving from Ontario to Kimberley, British Columbia, Canada’s second-loftiest city. So far, he’s decreased the size and added a variable torque converter to change the power ratio and climb hills. His latest Skizee can go 12 mph uphill and can reach 25 mph in flat powder. Maidment continues to test his invention in the snowy woods around his home, and he’s making final tweaks to the design now. One day he hopes to see the Skizee in pro shops everywhere.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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