Capacitor Archives

Wind Lantern

In this project, we’ll build a small, vertical-axis wind turbine, or VAWT for short. These are not as efficient as their horizontal-axis cousins, but they are better suited to urban environments where wind can come from all different directions. Normally, when you give electricity to a motor, it spins. The same is true in reverse: […]

IC Wall Outlet Adapter

I like to build a lot of circuitry, but the voltage regulators that most IC’s require get annoying when you have to keep on buying them and putting them into each board you want to power. This is a very simple little device that will take the voltage coming from a power outlet in your […]

Tweet-A-Watt Power Monitor

By Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone We live in a rented apartment, so we don’t have hacking access to a power meter or breaker panel. But we still wanted to measure our household power usage long-term, so we developed the Tweet-a-Watt. It uses plug-in electricity monitors at each outlet to wirelessly send readings to a […]