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October 11, 2009

Real-time energy monitoring

A few months ago, I met Mike Costa at Design Continuum. He had a Chumby on his desk which was set to monitor the energy usage of the building. At the time, he was working out the technical details of the system, and now has posted up some info about the project. Here are some highlights:

Real time power monitoring has been proven to effectively reduce power consumption due to waste. It is intuitive to consider that humans need some sort of feedback in order to recognize the presence of waste. For example if one leaves the faucet open one has sound and sight feedback indicating there is waste. What sort of feedback do we have for electricity? None really, this is why these systems can help with waste reduction

The system uses images from a camera to track changes on the power meter, which is then fed through the network, converted to data and ported to the Google Powermeter. The data can then be viewed online from any browser. The history page gives some more context on the data. Check out more about the project's impact on the Analysis page.

The data can be sent to any device as long as the device has internet access and can read a RSS feed. So a web browser can display it, as well as a cell phone that has internet access. The data that the Chumby takes comes from this address. The Chumby application is a simple flash movie that reads from the above RSS feed and displays the data. The color changes from green to red as we use more electricity, so at night, the text will be green/yellow. This is a link to the exact same flash movie that is running on the Chumby. It updates in real time. The data is being served from a web server I built.

More:

October 7, 2009

How-To: Solar food dehydrator

Check out this solar food deydrator made from reclaimed materials, and get started on your dried fruit recipes!

October 5, 2009

Hand-tied paracord sling

I'm really digging all the manly knotwork going on over at Stormdrane's blog.

Knotwork two-liter bottle carrier

Stormdrane paracord two-liter bottle holder 2.jpg

More paracord goodness from Stormdrane.

October 3, 2009

Unpowered mechanical gate opener, the video

Okay, MichaelLubke is officially my favorite reader ever. In response to my recent post speculating about mechanical gate openers, not only did he run out and snap some photos of a working "Gandy Slide-A-Way" near his ranch, but in response to appreciative comments from our readers he went back and got this video of it in operation. Awesome! Look at it go! Thanks so much Michael!

October 2, 2009

Novel edge-collecting solar panels

This is a solar panel. Really. If you've observed that it looks a lot like a piece of live-edge fluorescent acrylic, you're more than halfway to understanding how it works. Light entering the panel from the sides is absorbed by dyes and converted, by some fancy top-secret nano-metal whatnot ingredients, into a kind of internal re-radiation that is collected by conventional silicon applied only at the edges. Fair warning: Full science-hype disclosure rules apply here. The responsible party is Israel's GreenSun, and they do not have a product at market yet. But The Economist seems to be buying in, and their ethos is good for a click or two, in my book.

October 1, 2009

Vertical panorama of redwood tree

How do you photograph a 300' tall tree in a dense forest with no clear sight lines? Wildlife photographer Michael Nichols did it by taking a bunch of close-ups using a special camera rig and stitching them together digitally. NPR has the full story. [via Hack-a-Day]

September 29, 2009

Don't have a chair? Grow your own.

Almost 100 years ago, John Krubsack made this amazing chair by growing a bunch of box elder trees together. What makes this extra special is that he figured out how to graft the trees together as they were growing, so that they naturally formed all of the joints to hold it together. The whole thing took about 11 years to grow. In this age of rapid prototyping, I can hardly imagine spending that long on a project. It just might be possible, however, to make a miniature version for a mouse out of some brassica rapa plants.

Oh, and if you are looking to raise your own furniture, treehugger has some plans to grow
a three-legged stool.

[via neatorama]

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind -- fantastic new book about a how a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind

I reviewed The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind for Good. I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. Here's an excerpt of my review:

William Kamkwamba's parents couldn't afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son's school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family's corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.
With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word "grapes" meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, "The book has since changed my life."
Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. "A windmill meant more than just power," he wrote, "it was freedom."
For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it's another thing altogether. It's nothing short of monumental.

Read the rest of my review at GOOD.

William
William Kamkwamba visits Baobab Health Trust founder and TED Fellow Gerry Douglas' home in Lilongwe, Malawi. Gerry is giving William a lesson in machining helicopter and windmill blades with various types of cutters. (It was very exciting to read that William's favorite magazine is MAKE!)

September 23, 2009

Unpowered mechanical gate opener

In an age of ubiquitous electronics and electromechanical systems, I think it's easy to forget that we don't necessarily need electricity for everything. I'm no Luddite, by any stretch of the imagination; I just think some problems are more sustainably and elegantly solved with purely mechanical devices.

Take the problem of opening a gate from a vehicle. Both my father and my brother live on gated properties, not because they're rolling in so much dough, but because they live out in the sticks and keep livestock and pets that they can't have wandering off. So they've both got vehicle gates in their fences, and both gates are well removed from any source of municipal electricity.

Dad went to considerable expense to install an electric gate opener powered by a lead-acid battery kept up by a solar panel, which works just like a suburban garage door opener. Very convenient, in use, but expensive to install and with considerable maintenance troubles associated with the battery and the solar panel and the motor and the mechanics. My brother, on the other hand, opted for the minimal solution and has no opener at all. When he leaves in the morning and when he gets home at night, he has to stop at the gate, get out of the car, open the gate, drive through it, stop again, get out again, close the gate, and get back in the car before continuing on his way. A low-cost solution with basically zero maintenance, but he pays for it with inconvenience.

Personally, I've always thought an intermediate solution would suit them both better--something purely mechanical, that would be cheaper and hardier than the radioservomechanical rig my Dad installed, and yet considerably more convenient than the get-out-and-do-it-yourself approach my brother has taken. Then last weekend I was browsing a use bookstore and happened upon a copy of George A. Martin's Fences, Gates, and Bridges and How to Build Them, first published in 1900. It included the diagram shown above, with the accompanying explanation:

Figure 204 shows a gate balanced in a similar manner, and arranged so it can be opened by a person desiring to drive through, without leaving the vehicle. It is suspended by ropes which pass over pulleys near the top of long posts, and counterpoised by weights upon the other ends of the ropes. Small wheels are placed in the ends of the gate to move along the inside of the posts, and thus reduce the friction. The gate is raised by means of ropes attached to the center of the upper side of the gate, from which they pass up to pulleys in the center of the archway, and then out along horizontal arms at right angles to the bars which connect the tops of the posts. By pulling on the rope, the gate, which is but a trifle heavier than the balancing weights, is raised, and after the vehicle has passed, the gate falls of itself. In passing in the opposite direction, another rope is pulled, when the gate is raised as before.

Googling around reveals, of course, that nobody is selling any such device, that I can find, so if one wanted one it would have to be a custom job. I wonder about the possibility of a system that uses the weight of the vehicle to trip the mechanism instead of a rope. Anybody seen a purely mechanical gate opener in real life?

Electrobike Pi

Spotted this sexy commercial electric bicycle in a back issue of Popular Science at the barber shop today. It's called Pi, and the company that makes it is based out of San Francisco. The magazine article claims it uses a Nu Vinci continuously-variable transmission but the official company specs now only mention a Shimano 8-speed. Sounds like they're still working out the kinks. Something to keep an eye on, though.

The Belonio stove

Alexis Belonio is an associate professor in agricultural engineering at the Central Philippine University of Iloilo City. In 2008 he received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for a rice-husk-burning stove he designed. Belonio's stove is not complicated, either mechanically or conceptually: A columnar metal burner with the addition of a small intake fan at the base to tip the stoichiometry of combustion towards oxidation, giving a blue, clean, efficient flame that leaves little or no residue. Traditional rice husk burners, by contrast, do not have this forced-air feature and produce a yellow, dirty, inefficient flame that leaves tar behind. The upshot is more efficient use of rice husk biomass and greatly reduced pollution from the many rice-husk burners in use today.

September 21, 2009

Wireless RGB LED light bulb

Looking to increase his atmospheric lighting options, maker Jeroen Domburg built this wirelessly controlled RGB LED light bulb using an ATTiny44, RGB LED emitter, USB-PSU, and 433MHz RF receiver. The whole thing managed to fit inside a standard CFL housing and cost slightly less than a retail version.

[via hackaday]

September 18, 2009

Cheap fisheye lens

This fisheye lens is made from the innards of a broken Sigma 28-200mm lens. I have come across a few broken, or just old and scratched, camera lenses at garage sales that would be perfect for this project.

Although there aren't specific directions on how to make one, the image above does make it look easy. via - DIYPhotography

In the Maker Shed:

High-Speed Photography Kit Version 4

September 17, 2009

Straw-bale house construction timeline

Peter Maltzan is building a passive solar straw-bale house, and has been at it since October of 2008. He's done a great job of documenting the construction process, which is now nearly complete, in photographs. Highly recommended if you want to get a feel for how it all goes together. Thanks to MAKE subscriber Pete Marchetto for suggesting the link.

September 16, 2009

Baskets from recycled R12 bottles

Junktion is a boutique in Tel Aviv featuring locally-made recycled products. Recyclart put me on to these cool baskets made from chopped up ~~liquid propane~~ Freon gas bottles.

September 15, 2009

Energetic Power Flower art sculpture makes light

This whimsical art sculpture, by Art Energy Design, is also a renewable energy display. By incorporating small solar cells into the leaves, and building a small wind turbine out of the flower petals, it is able to store enough energy to keep itself lit by LEDs at night. I can't imagine that it is technically a very efficient generator of power, however the idea of a rotating flower/wind turbine is neat. Next, I'm hoping for some solar-powered singing flowers a la Alice in Wonderland.

[via Gwendolyn Schmidt on twitter]

September 11, 2009

DIY Electric El Camino

Electrocamino Comp
Electro-Camino 041
DIY Electric El Camino @ Wired.com

The electronic controls engineer from Franksville, Wisconsin, electrified an ‘81 Chevrolet El Camino, a poster child for the darkest days of American automotive design and a car with enough steel to shrug off a collision with a Sherman tank.

Last days of the Waterpod project

Here's a fun art event happening in NYC next week:

We will celebrate the closing of our amazing four-month journey with "Future of Mobility, Urbanity, and Water(pods)" at the World's Fair Marina in Flushing, Queens from September 16 - 27th. This celebration will include events with WFMU, Conflux Festival, Underwater New York, Swimming Cities, a series of hands-on workshops for Thriving After the Flood by artist Christopher Robbins, Natalie Jeremijenko's Environmental Health Clinic, and "Ascend" a pirate television broadcast/ planetarium installation by artist James Case Leal, concluding with an all day "I Remember Future" party on Sunday, September 27, 2009 from 11am-11pm.

More about the Waterpod:

The Waterpod is a floating, sculptural eco-habitat and living experiment that recalls the work of Buckminster Fuller, Andrea Zittel, and Constant Nieuwenhuys. In preparation for the coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, the Waterpod was designed by Mary Mattingly, a New York-based photographer and sculptor, in collaboration with a multinational team of artists, designers, scientists, and marine engineers. By the end of its tour the Waterpod will have docked in all five boroughs and Governors Island.

The Waterpod functions as a living sculpture that produces its own food, power, and water using permaculture design, rainwater catchment, solar power, and appropriate technologies. It is both a public space that brings art, science, and ecology into a forward-thinking ecosystem and a model of an enclosed private space, presenting the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities. The Waterpod connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.

More:

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea

Technicolor fish of the Plastiquarium

David Edgar makes great (re)use of common plastic containers, resulting in a variety of exotic creatures. Nice to see those powerfully bright detergent jugs reborn in his Plastiquarium series -

Modern myth suggests that a century of increasing phosphate levels in Earth's marine environment caused new, synthetic life forms to emerge. As recyclable HDPE plastic containers spread concentrates of consumer product pollutants, the Plastiquarium creatures evolved in the image of their packaging forbearers.

... sounds plausible to me =) A variety of Edgar's work can be seen @ Shadetree Studios. [Thanks, Terry!]