The folks @ MIT are warming up to the idea of parabolic solar collectors, recently demonstrating this 12-foot dish of massive heating power – — the completed mirror focuses enough solar energy at its focal point to melt solid steel. The energy of typical sunlight is concentrated by a factor of 1,000. This was showcased […]
This is a nice article on how to identify and extract rotary encoders. It then explores how to decode your rotary encoder and has a little lesson on Quadrature Encoding. It does not go into extreme detail, but there is a lot of useful information. Some recent stereos do, especially ugly boom boxes and (non-ugly) […]
Gotwind is a Ben Jandrell’s (Shropshire, England) DIY site for renewable energy projects. The site has a number of cool projects and technical info and tutorials. Here’s an excerpt from his page on the Sturmey Archer GH6 Dynohub: The Sturmey Archer GH6 Dynohub was designed as a means of generating electrical lighting power for bicycles […]
A product design student at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK wanted to address the problem of prevalent bike theft so he created this bike for around US$30. It doesn’t say whether this was just for the frame or for everything. And no, it doesn’t melt in a rainstorm. He used hexacomb board, which is […]
This mobile Nintendo Wii station is built with an HD monitor powered partly by solar energy. Inside is a battery, power converter and solar panel that generates enough juice to power the Wii. Pretty cool idea for a portable console, although it might be hard to see the screen, not to mention the fact that […]
A middle school student in GuangDong, China made a bike washing machine, not many details but ready for a re-make via Tim. More: DIY lamp from an old washing machine barrel. The pedal powered washing machine. Non-Invasive washing machine cycle detector project.
Prompted by the coverage of the AIDG Pico-Hydro system, here and on Gizmodo, Catherine Laine of AIDG asked the developer, Sam Redfield, to provide more information. She tells us that he’s also going to try and get a parts list and tech specs that she’ll share with us. [Thanks, Cat!] Sam Redfield on Pico-hydro at […]
