I have always hated mowing the lawn. I was the guy who only mowed when the grass got to be 6″ taller than the neighbors’ lawns — not because I don’t like my neighbors, but because mowing was such a pain. After being hit by one too many rocks, I decided I no longer wanted […]
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Convert your DC motor into a dynamo and use it to generate light without batteries. All you need is some capacitors, a DC motor, diode, wire, gear system and LED. To make it light all you need to do is spin your dynamo.
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Safely and effectively charge your USB-powered devices when you are away from your computer with this handy charger! Please note: There have been reports that the Minty Boost has issues charging the iPhone 3GS.
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Albert Einstein once wrote that God does not play dice with the universe. To which Niels Bohr (or Enrico Fermi) reportedly replied, “Stop telling God what to do with his dice.” Here’s a mood lamp that expresses these dice as 4 multicolored cubes that blink randomly, with true randomness — not the deterministic, pseudo-random chaos […]
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Powering a TV remote with the sun means you won’t have to buy batteries every six months to surf from your sofa. Low-voltage devices that use power only occasionally, like remotes, are good candidates for a solar-powered trickle-charge. Here’s how we modded our remote to live off of the sun, using rechargeable batteries connected in parallel with a small solar cell and a diode to keep any power from trickling back out.
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Back in the 1970s, my friend Wayne Gillis and I used to do light shows at science fiction conventions. We had the usual panoply of overhead, slide, and custom-made projectors, and a single, very expensive, helium-neon laser from Edmund Scientific. Calling ourselves Light Opera, and later, Illuminatus, we performed at ConFusion conventions in Ann Arbor, […]
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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 […]
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