Directing Ambient Light For Some Extra Glow

February 11, 2023 by 17 Comments

[Yuichiro Morimoto] wanted to create a decorative lamp, one that wasn’t burdened with batteries or wires, but used just the ambient light in the room to create a directed glow effect. Using a coloured circular acrylic sheet, with a special coating (not specified) ambient light impinging on the surface is diffused toward the edge. This centre sheet is embedded in an opalescent sheet, which scatters the light from the center sheet, giving a pleasant glow, kind of akin to a solar corona. An additional diffuser cover sheet on the front covers over the edge to hide it, and further enhance the glow effect.

Details of the ‘special coating’ are scarce, with the coloured sheet described as a condenser plate. This clearly isn’t the same as diffuser plastic, as that cannot be seen through as clearly as some of the photographs show. So we’re a little stumped on this one! Please answer in the comments if you can, ahem, shed some light on this one!

When talking about ambient light, many people will think more along the lines of active lighting, for example, adaptive ambient light around a TV like this hack.

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A wooden box sits on a darker wooden table. The box has a red, glowing number 8 on it.

Ambient Display Tells You If Borealis Is Coming To Town

January 29, 2023 by 8 Comments

For those times when you’d rather not get sucked down another internet rabbit hole when you really just wanted the weather, an ambient display can be great. [AlexanderK106] built a simple ambient display to know the probability the Northern Lights would visit his town.

Starting with a NodeMCU featuring the ESP8266, [AlexanderK106] walks us through a beginner-friendly tutorial on how to do everything from configure the Arduino IDE, the basics of using a breadboard. finding a data source and parsing it, and finally sticking everything into an enclosure.

The 7-segment display is taped and set into the back of the 1/4″ pine with enough brightness to shine through the additional layer of veneer on top. The display is set to show one digit and then the next before a three second repeat. A second display would probably make this easier to use day-to-day, but we appreciate him keeping it simple for this tutorial.

Looking for more ambient displays? Checkout the Tempescope or this clock that lets you feel the temperature outside!

Building A Homemade Ambient Pressure Submarine

January 11, 2023 by 27 Comments

About two years ago, [Hyperspace Pirate] set to work on building his own two-seater submarine, because who doesn’t want to have a submarine when you have just moved to Florida? In the linked video (also attached below), he describes the reasoning behind the submarine design. Rather than going with a fully sealed submarine with ambient pressure inside and a hull that resists the crushing forces from the water, he opted to go for a semi-wet ambient pressure design.

What this essentially entails is a fancy equivalent of an old-school diving bell: much as the name suggests, these are sealed except for the bottom, which allows for water to enter and thus equalize the pressure. Although this has the distinct disadvantage of being not dry inside (hence the semi-wet), it does mean that going for a dive is as easy as letting the water in via the bottom hole, and to resurface only a small amount of air injected into two ballast tanks and a pump are all that are required.

So far this submarine has survived a few test runs, which uncovered a number of issues, but diving and resurfacing seems to be going pretty smoothly now, which is definitely a massive plus with a submarine.

(Thanks to [Drew] for the tip!)

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This Smart Watch Keeps An Eye On Ambient CO2 Levels

October 30, 2021 by 20 Comments

Human respiration takes in oxygen and in turn, we exhale carbon dioxide. Thus, an uptick of carbon dioxide levels around us can indicate we’re in the presence of other humans, and also, perhaps, the pathogens they carry. To explore this phenomenon, [C Scott Ananian] developed a mod for the Watchy open-source smartwatch, which lets it detect carbon dioxide.

The idea behind the build is simple. If you’re around increased CO2 levels, it may be because you’re surrounded by people, and thus more likely to be exposed to COVID-19. To detect CO2, the watch relies on a Sensiron SCD40 or SCD41 sensor. This is read by the Watchy’s ESP32 microcontroller, and results are graphed on the watch’s e-Paper display. The Watchy is also given a nice new aluminum case to fit the additional hardware.

It’s cool having a graph on your wrist of the ambient concentration of CO2, and at the very least, it could make a good talking point next time you’re at a particularly boring party. You’ll also be more than ready to advise other partygoers if the carbon dioxide level is reaching dangerous levels.

We’ve seen similar builds before, which are useful not only for pandemic safety but also for monitoring if you have any leaks from CO2 storage in the house. If you’ve been working on your own ways to track dangerous gases, be sure to drop us a line!

TV Ambient Lighting Built For Awesome Performance

June 11, 2021 by 36 Comments

[AndrewMohawk] had seen all kinds of ambient lighting systems for TVs come and go over the years, and the one thing they all had in common was that they didn’t live up to his high standards. Armed with the tools of the hacker trade, he set about building an Ambilight-type system of his own that truly delivered the goods.

The development process was one full of roadblocks and dead ends, but [Andrew] persevered. After solving annoying problems with HDCP and HDMI splitters, he was finally able to get a Raspberry Pi to capture video going to his TV and use OpenCV to determine the colors of segments around the screen. From there, it was simple enough to send out data to a string of addressable RGB LEDs behind the TV to create the desired effect.

For all the hard work, [Andrew] was rewarded with an ambient lighting system that runs at a healthy 20fps and works with any HDMI video feed plugged into the TV. It even autoscales to work with video content shot in different aspect ratios so the ambient display always picks up the edge of the video content.

With 270 LEDs fitted, the result is an incredibly smooth and fluid ambient display we’d love to have at home. You can build one too, since [Andrew] shared all the code on Github. As an added bonus, he also gave the system an audio visualiser, and tested it out with some Streetlight Manifesto, the greatest third-wave ska band ever to roam the Earth. The Fourth Wave still eludes us, but we hold out hope.

We’ve seen plenty of hacks in this vein before; one of the most impressive hacked a smart TV into doing the video processing itself. Video after the break.

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Liquid Air Energy Storage: A Power Grid Battery Using Regular Old Ambient Air

July 24, 2020 by 83 Comments

When you think of renewable energy, what comes to mind? We’d venture to guess that wind and solar are probably near the top of the list. And yes, wind and solar are great as long as the winds are favorable and the sun is shining. But what about all those short and bleak winter days? Rainy days? Night time?

Render of a Highview LAES plant. The air is cleaned, liquefied in the tower, and stored in the white tanks. The blue tanks hold waste cold which is reused in the liquefaction process. Image via Highview Power

Unfavorable conditions mean that storage is an important part of any viable solution that uses renewable energy. Either the energy itself has to be stored, or else the means to produce the energy on demand must be stored.

One possible answer has been right under our noses all along — air. Regular old ambient air can be cooled and compressed into a liquid, stored in tanks, and then reheated to its gaseous state to do work.

This technology is called Cryogenic Energy Storage (CES) or Liquid Air Energy storage (LAES). It’s a fairly new energy scheme that was first developed a decade ago by UK inventor Peter Dearman as a car engine. More recently, the technology has been re-imagined as power grid storage.

UK utility Highview Power have adopted the technology and are putting it to the test all over the world. They have just begun construction on the world’s largest liquid air battery plant, which will use off-peak energy to charge an ambient air liquifier, and then store the liquid air, re-gasifying it as needed to generate power via a turbine. The turbine will only be used to generate electricity during peak usage. By itself, the LAES process is not terribly efficient, but the system offsets this by capturing waste heat and cold from the process and reusing it. The biggest upside is that the only exhaust is plain, breathable air.

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Harvesting Energy From Ambient Moisture

April 11, 2020 by 24 Comments

Generating electricity out of thin air is the fantasy for our modern technology dependant world, but still falls squarely in the world of science fiction. However, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst claim that they have found a way to do exactly that, using protein nano-wires to produce tiny amounts of electricity from ambient humidity.

The protein nano-wires in question are harvested from the microbe Geobacter sulfurreducens, to create a 7 µm thick film that is placed between two gold electrodes. One electrode completely covers the back of the film, while the front electrode covers only a tiny portion of the surface area. When the film is exposed ambient moisture, researchers measured 0.4 V – 0.6 V produced continuously for more than two months. The current density was about 17 µA/cm². This is only a fraction of the output of a commercial solar panel, but it can be layered with air gaps in between. The electricity is supposedly produced due to a moisture gradient through the thickness of the film. Harvesting energy using ambient humidity is not new, but the improvement in power density on this study is at least two orders of magnitude larger than that of previous studies.

The researches have named the technology Air-Gen and hope to develop it commercially. As we have seen many times before, promising lab results often don’t translate well into real world products, but this technology is definitely interesting.

We’ll continue to see all sorts of weird and wonderful ways to free up electrons, like using sweat, but we’ll have to wait and see what sticks.

Thanks for the tip [William Polo]!