Bicycle hub hydropower

[Niklas Roy] wanted to create electricity from moving water so he came up with this hyrdopower generator. It is part of his grand scheme to rent out small personal fountains made from buckets. They need electricity to run so he hooked up the generator to the water jet of a public fountain. It should be possible to use this … Read the rest

Hydropower generator

[Paul] wanted to have access to renewable energy at his cabin. It’s a relaxing place, nestled in a tall forest that shelters him from the sun and wind. This also means that solar and wind energy aren’t an option. But there is a stream running through the property so he decided to build his own version of a small water-powered Read the rest

ATtiny2313 prime number generator

[Scott Harden's] prime number generator exhibits a great way to use an LED matrix to present readable information. The project resides in a hinged wooden box with a grid of holes on the lid for the LEDs. [Scott] has overlaid the matrix with a printout showing powers of two that represent different prime numbers. Inside you’ll find an ATtiny2313 microcontroller … Read the rest

Homemade induction generator

[Tyler LaVite] tipped us off about the generator he built. He combined a 5.5 horsepower Honda motor with a 10 horsepower electric bandsaw motor. To get an induction generator to produce alternating current you must feed electricity into the system to start the magnetic flux. [Tyler's] solution was to include a bank of capacitors totaling 230mF which charge from … Read the rest

Is GEK a modern-day Mr. Fusion?

[Nanomonkey] spent the weekend building generators that run off of syngas. All Powers Lab produces Gasifier Experimenter Kits to convert raw material to energy. The kits use Gasification to make a “natural gas like” fuel from materials such as wood chips, walnut shells, construction debris or agricultural waste.

So is this the Mr. Fusion that powered the DeLorean? … Read the rest

Generate electricity with a candle

What you see above is a generator that converts heat to electricity. [Reukpower's] thermoelectric lamp is one of those hacks that makes you scratch your head even though you understand why it should work. The heart of the system uses a Peltier cool, just like the thermoelectric solar generator. When there is a temperature differential from one side of … Read the rest

Autonomous Bassline Generator

We’ve been watching this project ever since [Dann] emailed us about the first prototype back in September. This bassline generator has a lot of functions we like, such as an adjustable melody seed, light-sensitive controls, and device interactivity. Line up a row of them and they’ll sync up the beat, building layers of sound on top of each other (see … Read the rest