green hacks

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A black and white image of the Sun and Earth with a series of lines radiating out from the sun and bisecting rings circumscribed around it. On the Earth are three dots with the text "Active Server" on one exposed to the Sun and two dots representing "Inactive Server"s on the dark side.

Solar Protocol Envisions A Solar-Powered Web

April 21, 2023 by 34 Comments

The transition to low carbon energy is an important part of mitigating climate change, and the faster we can manage, the better. One project looking at how we could reduce the energy requirements of the web to more quickly adopt renewable energy is Solar Protocol.

Instead of routing requests to the fastest server when a user pulls up a website, Solar Protocol routes the request to the server currently generating the greatest amount of solar power. Once a user is on a website, the experience is energy-responsive. Website style and image resolution can range based on the power left in the active server’s batteries, including an image free low power mode.

Another benefit to the project’s energy efficiency approach is a focus on only the essential parts of a page and not any of the tracking or other privacy-endangering superfluous features present on many other websites. They go into much more depth in the Solar Protocol Manifesto. As a community project, Solar Protocol is still looking for more stewards since the network can go down if an insufficient number of servers are generating electricity.

For more details on the project that inspired Solar Protocol, check out this low-tech website.

There’s Cash In Them Old Solar Panels

April 12, 2023 by 82 Comments

The first solar panels may have rolled out of Bell Labs in the 1950s, with major press around their inconsistent and patchy adoption in the decades that followed, but despite the fanfare they were not been able to compete on a price per kilowatt compared to other methods of power generation until much more recently. Since then the amount of solar farms has increased exponentially, and while generating energy from the sun is much cleaner than most other methods of energy production and contributes no greenhouse gasses in the process there are some concerns with disposal of solar panels as they reach the end of their 30-year lifespan. Some companies are planning on making money on recycling these old modules rather than letting them be landfilled. Continue reading “There’s Cash In Them Old Solar Panels” →

Using Old Coal Mines As Cheap Sources Of Geothermal Heat

April 11, 2023 by 33 Comments

For as much old coal mines are a blight upon the face of the Earth, they may have at least one potential positive side-effect. Where the coal mine consists out of tunnels that were drilled deep into the soil, these tend to get flooded by groundwater after the pumps that keep them dry are turned off. Depending on the surrounding rock, this water tends to get not only contaminated, but also warmed up. As the BBC explains in a recent video as a follow-up to a 2021 article, when the water is pumped up for decontamination, it can be run through a heat exchanger in order to provide heat for homes and businesses. Continue reading “Using Old Coal Mines As Cheap Sources Of Geothermal Heat” →

A red Tesla Model 3 converted into a pickup truck with a black lumber rack extending over the roof of the cab sits in a grey garage. A black and silver charging robot is approaching its charging port from the right side attached to a black cable. The charging bot is mostly a series of tubes attached to a wheeled platform and the charging connector itself is attached to a linear actuator to insert the charging device.

Truckla Gets An Open Source Charging Buddy

April 11, 2023 by 11 Comments

More than three years have passed since Tesla announced its Cybertruck, and while not a one has been delivered, the first Tesla truck, Truckla, has kept on truckin’. [Simone Giertz] just posted an update of what Truckla has been up to since it was built.

[Giertz] and friend’s DIT (do-it-together) truck was something of an internet sensation when it was revealed several months before the official Tesla Cybertruck. As with many of our own projects, while it was technically done, it still had some rough edges that kept it from being truly finished, like a lack of proper waterproofing or a tailgate that didn’t fold.

Deciding enough was enough, [Giertz] brought Truckla to [Marcos Ramirez] and [Ross Huber] to fix the waterproofing and broken tailgate while she went to [Viam Labs] to build Chargla, an Open Source charging bot for Truckla. The charging bot uses a linear actuator on a rover platform to dock with the charging port and is guided by a computer vision system. Two Raspberry Pis power handle the processing for the operation. We’re anxious to see what’s next in [Giertz]’s quest of “picking up the broken promises of the car world.”

If you want to see some more EV charger hacks, check out this Arduino-Based charger and the J1772 Hydra.

Continue reading “Truckla Gets An Open Source Charging Buddy” →

The UK’s ST40 Spherical Tokamak Achieves Crucial Plasma Temperatures

April 11, 2023 by 23 Comments

As the race towards the first commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor heats up, the UK-based Tokamak Energy has published a paper on its recent achievements with its ST40 spherical tokamak. Most notable is the achieving of plasma temperatures of over 100 million Kelvin, which would put this fusion reactor firmly within the range for deuterium-tritium fusion at a rate that would lead credence to the projection made by Tokamak Energy about building its first commercial fusion plants in the 2030s.

The ST40 is intended to provide the necessary data to construct the ST80-HTS by 2026, which itself would be a testing ground for the first commercial reactor, called the ST-E1, which would be rated at 200 MWe. Although this may seem ambitious, Tokamak Energy didn’t come out of nowhere, but is a spin-of of Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), the UK’s national laboratory for fusion research, which was grounded in 1965, and has been for decades been involved in spherical tokamak research projects like MAST and MAST-Upgrade, with STEP as its own design for a commercial fusion reactor.

The advantage offered by spherical tokamaks compared to regular tokamaks is that they favor a very compact construction style which puts the magnets very close to the plasma, effectively making them more efficient in retaining the plasma, with less power required to maintain stable plasma. Although this makes the use of super-conducting electromagnets not necessary, it does mean that wear and tear on these magnets is significantly higher. What this does mean is that this type of tokamak can be much cheaper than alternative reactor types, even if they do not scale as well.

Whether or not Tokamak Energy will be the first to achieve commercial nuclear fusion remains to be seen. So far Commonwealth Fusion’s SPARC and a whole host of Western and Asian fusion projects are vying for that gold medal.

How Simple Can A Wind Generator Get?

March 9, 2023 by 12 Comments

As the world has moved towards sustainable energy sources over the last few years, it’s increasingly common to be close to a wind turbine. The huge turbines visible on the horizon from where this is being written are the upper end of the scale though, and along comes [Robert Murray Smith] with the opposite, probably the simplest and smallest wind turbine we’ve seen.

His use of a 3-phase motor from a CD-ROM drive as the generator isn’t particularly unexpected, these motors are ubiquitous and readily generate power when spun up. A simple 3-phase rectifier and a capacitor delivers a DC voltage that while the ready availability of switching converter modules should be relatively easy to turn into something more useful.

The clever part of this hack lies then in the rotor, it’s not the propeller-style bladed affair you might expect. Instead he takes a CD, as it’s the obvious thing to fit on a CD motor, and glues a piece of Tyvek on top of it. This is cut to form four flaps which make a rudimentary but effective turbine when the wind comes from the side. It’s beautifully simple, and we wish we’d thought of it ourselves. The whole thing is in the video below the break, so take a look.

Maybe this won’t solve the green energy requirement on its own, but we’ve shown you far larger fabric turbines in the past.

Continue reading “How Simple Can A Wind Generator Get?” →

A Ground Source Heat Pump From An Air Conditioner

March 7, 2023 by 37 Comments

When it comes to lower-energy home heating, it’s accurate in all senses to say that heat pumps are the new hotness. But unless you happen to work with them professionally, it’s fair to say their inner workings are beyond most of us. Help is at hand though courtesy of [petey53], who made his own ground source heat pump for his Toronto house using a pair of window-mounted air conditioning units.

Continue reading “A Ground Source Heat Pump From An Air Conditioner” →