A hand holds a round disc of noodles wrapped in a translucent film with herb specs embedded in it.

Reimagined Ramen Comes In Edible Package

September 15, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 31 Comments

Hackers and college students alike reach for ramen when they want to fuel up on a budget, but, if you’re concerned about packaging waste, the plastic film and foil packets start to weigh on your conscience. [Holly Grounds] was sick of this compromise and came up with a way to have your packaging and eat it too.

[Holly] first experimented with different bioplastics until she developed a recipe for “an edible, tasteless starch-based bioplastic, that dissolves in contact with boiling water.” With that accomplished, she next integrated flavoring into the bioplastic wrapper so that there’s no foil packet. She found that herbs and spices worked, but larger solids like shrimp couldn’t be incorporated into the film.

For the finishing touch, she fashioned the noodles into a disk so they fit better in a bowl for cooking. To cook the noodles, you remove a puck from the wax paper sleeve holding multiple servings, add boiling water, stir, and enjoy. [Holly] says that her ramen packets are quicker to prepare than existing packets since there are fewer steps and the shape is optimized for cooking. That’s a win-win for the planet and convenience.

If you want to see another pasta packaging marvel, we’ve previously covered Flat Pack Pasta. Have your own project to reduce packaging waste? Submit it to the Save the World Wildcard round of the Hackaday Prize which closes on October 16th!

A display in a field showing the water stress index over time

Hackaday Prize 2022: Using Infrared Thermometers To Measure Crops’ Water Stress

September 11, 2022 by Robin Kearey 6 Comments

If you live anywhere on the Northern Hemisphere, you’re likely to have experienced one of the many heatwaves that occurred this summer. Extreme heat is dangerous for humans and animals, but plants, including important crops, also suffer. High temperatures lead to increased transpiration and evaporation, and if the water lost in this way is not replenished quickly enough, plants will stop growing and eventually wither and die.

In order to keep track of the amount of water available to crops, [Florian Ellsäßer] built the Crop Water Stress Sensor: a device that checks whether plants have enough moisture available to stay healthy. It does this by measuring the temperature of the leaves to calculate evaporation levels. If the leaves are cooler than their surroundings, this means that water is evaporating from them and the plant apparently has enough water available. If the leaves’ temperature is closer to the ambient temperature, then the plant may be running low on water.

[Florian]’s system performs this measurement using an infrared array, which is basically a low-resolution thermal camera that remotely measures the temperature of everything in its field of view. This IR array is pointed at a field, where it will see both leaves and the ground between them. The difference in temperature between these two can then be used to calculate the Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI), a standardized measure of how well-hydrated plants are. The result is shown on a display and also indicated using a convenient red-yellow-green status LED that shows if the crops in question need watering.

The system can be solar powered for completely remote operation, while its data can be read out through a WiFi interface. [Florian] is planning to update the design with a LoRa interface for greater range: the eventual goal is to build a large network of these sensors throughout agricultural areas and use the combined data to raise awareness of water shortages in certain areas. In order to make the sensors easy to build by anyone interested, all design files are available on the project page.

Keeping crops moisturized is one of the key tasks of agriculture, and we’ve seen several projects that aim to optimize and automate it, from a simple-but-effective ESP8266-based moisture sensor to complete hydroponics systems.

Renewable Hydrogen Sucked From Thinish Air

September 11, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 26 Comments

Stored hydrogen is often touted as the ultimate green energy solution, provided the hydrogen is produced from genuinely green power sources. But there are technical problems to be overcome before your average house will be heated with pumped or tank-stored hydrogen. One problem is that the locations that have lots of scope for renewable energy, don’t always have access to plenty of pure water, and for electrolysis you do need both. A team from Melbourne University have come up with a interesting way to produce hydrogen by electrolysis directly from the air.

Redder areas have more water risk and renewable potential

By utilising a novel electrolysis cell with a hygroscopic electrolyte, the so-called direct air electrolysis (DAE) can operate with humidity as low as 4% relative, so perfectly fine even in the most arid areas, after all there may not be clouds but the air still holds a bit of water. This is particularly relevant to regions of the world, such as deserts, where there is simultaneously a high degree of water risk, and plenty of solar potential. Direct electrolysis of saline extracted at coastal areas is one option, but dealing with the liberated chlorine is a big problem.

The new prototype is very simple in construction, with a sponge of melamine or a sintered glass foam soaked in a compatible electrolyte. Potassium Hydroxide (alkaline) was tried as was Potassium Acetate (base) and Sulphuric Acid, but the latter degraded the host material in a short time. Who would have imagined? Anyway, with electrolysis cell design, a key problem is ensuring the separate gasses stay separate, and in this case, are also separate from the air. This was neatly ensured by arranging the electrolyte sponge fully covered both electrodes, so as the hygroscopic material extracted water from the air, the micro-channels in the structure filled up with liquid, with it touching both ends of the cell, forming the circuit and allowing the electrolysis to proceed.

Hydrogen, being very light, would rise upward through holes in the cathode, to be collected and stored. Oxygen simply passed back into the air, after passing though the liquid reservoir at the base. Super simple, and from reading the paper, quite effective too.

You can kind of imagine a future built around this now, where you’re driving your hydrogen fuel cell powered dune buggy around the Sahara one weekend, and you stop at a solar-powered hydrogen fuel station for a top up and a pasty. Ok, possibly not that last bit.

The promised hydrogen economy may be inching closer. We covered using aluminium nanoparticles to rip hydrogen out of water. But once you have the gas, you need to store and handle it. Toyota might have a plan for that. Then perhaps handling gas directly at all isn’t a great idea, and maybe the future is paste?

Thanks to [MmmDee] for the tip!

A black PCB with an ESP32 and an SBM-20 geiger counter

Flexible Radiation Monitoring System Speaks LoRa And WiFi

September 10, 2022 by Robin Kearey 12 Comments

Radioactivity has always been a fascinating phenomenon for anyone interested in physics, and as a result we’ve featured many radioactivity-related projects on these pages over the years. More recently however, fears of nuclear disaster have prompted many hackers to look into environmental radiation monitoring. [Malte] was one of those looking to upgrade the radiation monitor on his weather station, but found the options for wireless geiger counters a bit limited.

So he decided to build himself his own Wifi and LoRa compatible environmental radiation monitor. Like most such projects it’s based on the ubiquitous Soviet-made SBM-20 GM tube, although the design also supports the Chinese J305βγ model. In either case, the tube’s operating voltage is generated by a discrete-transistor based oscillator which boosts the board’s 5 V supply to around 400 V with the help of an inductor and a voltage multiplier.

Graphs showing temperature, humidity and radiation levels — Data can be visualized in graphs, together with other data from the weather station like temperature and humidity

The tube’s output signal is converted into clean digital pulses to be counted by either an ESP32 or a Moteino R6, depending on the choice of wireless protocol. The ESP can make its data available through a web interface using its WiFi interface, while the Moteino can communicate through LoRa and sends out its data using MQTT. The resulting data is a counts-per-minute value which can be converted into an equivalent dose in Sievert using a simple conversion formula.

All design files are available on [Malte]’s website, including a PCB layout that neatly fits inside standard waterproof enclosures. Getting more radiation monitors out in the field can only be a good thing, as we found out when we tried to detect a radiation accident using community-sourced data back in 2019. Don’t like WiFi or LoRa? There’s plenty of other ways to connect your GM tubes to the internet.

2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa

August 23, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more effectively. The latest tool from [YJ] makes it possible to use much less water while still keeping plant yields high.

This is an improvement on a previous project which automates watering and lighting of a small area or single pot. This latest creation, called FLORA, includes a LoRa module for communication up to 3 kilometers, and the ESP32 on board also handles monitoring of soil moisture, humidity and other sensors. It also includes a pump driver for managing irrigation systems so that smart decisions can be made about when to water. Using this device, the water usage when testing was reduced by around 30% compared to a typical timed irrigation system.

Using a smart system like this is effective for basically any supply of water, but for those who get water from something like an off-grid rainwater system or an expensive water utility, the gains are immediate. If you aren’t already growing your own food to take advantage of tools like this, take a look at this primer to get you started.

Ask Hackaday: How Can You Store Energy At Home?

August 16, 2022 by Maya Posch 156 Comments

Amidst the discussions about grid-level energy storage solutions, it is often easy to forget that energy storage can be done on the level of a single house or building as well. The advantages here are that no grid management is needed, with the storage (electrical, thermal, etc.) absorbing the energy as it becomes available, and discharging it when requested. This simplifies the scale of the problem and thus the associated costs significantly.

Perhaps the most common examples of such systems are solar thermal collectors with an associated hot water storage tank, and of course batteries. More recently, the idea of using a battery electric vehicle (BEV, ‘electric car’) as part of a home storage solution is also gaining traction, especially for emergencies where the grid connection has failed due to a storm or similar emergencies. But all-in-all, we don’t see many options for home-level energy storage.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Can You Store Energy At Home?” →

Hackaday Prize 2022: Solar Power Through Pyrolysis

August 12, 2022 by Jenny List 19 Comments

We’re all familiar with solar cells, be they photovoltaic, or for heating water. But they are only the more common ways of converting the sun’s energey into usable power, and to the extended list there is now an addition courtesy of [Dennis]. He’s using the sun to drive the pyrolysis of biomass waste, releasing hydrogen fuel.

For those who aren’t familiar with the chemistry, pyrolysis refers to chemical reactions triggered by heat. In this case, when organic biomass is heated in the absence of oxygen it breaks down and releases the gaseous products of that breakdown as well as a mass of carbon. The idea behind this pyrolysis cell is that a Fresnel lens will focus the sun on a reaction chamber, providing the required heat for the reaction to occur. A test with a magnifier and a test tube proves that there’s something in it.

Of course, sharp-eyed readers will notice that this isn’t quite in the same vein as other cells which convert the Sun’s energy into a usable form, in that while it provides an input of energy for the pyrolysis the chemical energy in the resulting gas comes mostly from the original biomass. There is a silver lining to the prospect of burning gas though, in that the left-over carbon can be incorporated into the soil as biochar, an effective carbon sink.

We’ve seen a project pursuing a similar chemistry before, though not using solar energy to do it.