From Saw Dust To Stove Fuel

March 18, 2014 by James Hobson 39 Comments

brisquit maker

[Alois Schmid] is an avid woodworker, and as such, he makes a lot of saw dust. Unfortunately, saw dust is kind of wasteful — it doesn’t burn very well unless it is compressed… so he built his own wood briquette press!

He originally looked at purchasing a machine designed for this, until he discovered they run upwards of 10,000 Euros. You could buy an amazing CNC mill for that! Needless to say, it was out of the question.

He started by purchasing a new more efficient dust extractor and an electric log splitter, and then he built an ingenious feeder system. He’s replaced the log splitter blade with a long metal dowel with a protrusion at the end (helps keeps the briquettes in one piece), which is slightly smaller than the compression tube he’s built.

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Cleaning Up Smoke With An Electrostatic Precipitator

March 13, 2014 by James Hobson 56 Comments

[Steve Dufresne’s] got another great project for us — a device that effectively gets rid of smoke!

It’s called an electrostatic precipitator and it works similar to the way many cars are painted today using a process called electrostatic coating. Electrostatic coating works by giving the paint particles an electrostatic charge, opposite to the charge on the vehicle’s body panels — this makes the two attract and results in using around 95% of sprayed paint — barely any over-spray, and a better bond to boot!

[Steve’s] tried this experiment of creating a smoke precipitator with the eventual goal of using it on a car’s exhaust. He’s been through a few designs so far, and finally has one that works quite well. It’s not even that complicated, just take a look at the following diagram.

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7-Foot DIY Wind Turbine Proves Size Matters

February 10, 2014 by Rich Bremer 15 Comments

7ft-wind-turbine

When [brokengun] decided to build a 7 ft diameter wind turbine, he had no idea how to even start, so he did as most of us would do and read some books on the topic. His design criteria was that it would be simple to construct and use as many recycled parts as possible. This wind turbine charges a 12 volt battery which can then be used to power a variety of gadgets.

Although made from recycled components, this isn’t a thrown together wind turbine. A lot of thought went into the design and build. [brokengun] discusses matching the blade size to that of the generator in order to maximize power and efficiency. The design also incorporates a feature that will turn the turbine perpendicular to the wind if the wind-speed gets to high. Doing this prevents the turbine from being damaged by strong gusts.

For the main support/hub assembly, a Volvo 340 strut was used because they are widely available, cheap and known for being long-lasting. The tail boom is made from electrical conduit and it’s length is determined by the size of the main fan rotor. The tail vane is made from steel sheet metal and its surface area is also dependent on the fan rotor size to ensure that the turbine functions properly. The blades are made from wood but instead of making them himself, [brokengun] felt these were worth ponying up some cash. [brokengun] also scored a 30 ft high lattice tower an airport was getting rid of. This worked out great as it’s just the right height for a turbine of this size.

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Software-Controlled Per-Port Power Switching For USB Hubs

February 5, 2014 by Kristina Panos 34 Comments

[Befi] wanted to add a second stage backup disk to his ODROID embedded-board server, which typically draws ~1.5W at idle. After adding the disk, he saw power consumption increase by 2W when the new disk wasn’t spinning. He thought about using one of those USB hubs with the adorable little rocker switches for each port and replacing them with transistors, but that was going to be messy. After some poking around in the USB standard, he found that most support per-port power switching (PPPS), and set about to hack a USB hub to enable software-controlled per-port switching.

[Befi]’s NEC hub uses a uPD720112 chip which supports PPPS according to the datasheet. After tying the configuration pin labeled GANG_B to +3.3V, the hub declared itself PPPS-compatible. Of course, the manufacturer saved a penny or two by omitting the individual switches, so [Befi] added an open-drain NMOS to each port. He is using this program to switch the port on and off and made the switching transparent with autofs. [Befi]’s current script has the bus ID and device ID of the hub hard-coded, but he intends to update it to find them automatically. This hack saves him 10W on average, which is about €30 ($40) per year.

If your hub is under powered, you could try adding an external power supply.

$1 Coin Cell Charger

January 17, 2014 by James Hobson 46 Comments

Sure, coin cells usually last a long time — but do you really want to buy new ones and throw the old ones out? The LiR2032 coin cell is a rechargeable lithium battery, for which you can build a charger at around $1.

The 5 minute hack starts with a TP4056 lithium charging circuit, which is a great DIY board designed to charge high-capacity cells at about 1A. Luckily, it is pretty easy to modify the board to charge lower capacity batteries. It’s just a matter of replacing resistor R4, and a little bit of soldering! Continue reading “$1 Coin Cell Charger” →

A New Way To Heat People

December 16, 2013 by James Hobson 146 Comments

[Leigh Christie] is a researcher at MIT, and he’s developed an interesting solution to heating people, not buildings.

His TEDx talk, “Heating Buildings is Stupid,” demonstrates the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory’s efforts to tackle energy issues. Their research focuses on finding an alternative to the staggering waste of energy used to heat large spaces. Although TED talk articles are a rarity at Hackaday, we think this idea is both simple and useful. Also, [Leigh] is the same guy who brought us the Mondo Spider a few years ago for the Burning Man exhibition. He’s a hacker.

Anyway, what is it? The system he’s devised is so simple that it’s brilliant: a person-tracking infrared heat spotlight. Using a Microsoft Kinect, the lamp follows you around and keeps the individual warm rather than the entire space. [Leigh] has grand plans for implementing what he calls “Local Heating” in large buildings to save on energy consumption, but smaller-scale implementations could prove equally beneficial for a big garage or a workshop. How much does your workspace cost to heat during the winter? Hackerspaces seem like the perfect test environment for a cobbled-together “Local Heating” system. If anyone builds one, we want to hear about it.

Check out the full TEDx talk after the break.

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Peltier Joule Thief Power Supply

November 12, 2013 by Todd Harrison 20 Comments

[Steven] manages to power an LED for 15 minutes using hot and cold water as a battery. He does this using the thermoelectric effect also known as the Seebeck effect, Peltier effect or Thomson effect. This isn’t particularly new; in fact there are commercial products that you can use to charge a cell phone using a small campfire or internal burner that works on the same principle.

What is interesting about [Steven’s] device is that he uses a salvaged Peltier device not meant for generating electricity, coupled with a home built joule thief circuit. In the video he describes how the joule thief functions and powers the LED using the small voltage generated by the Peltier device. The energy for the thermoelectric effect is conducted from a hot water bath through aluminum plates, through the positive and negative sides of the Peltier device, through more aluminum plates and finally into a cold water bath. As the heat energy transfers through the Peltier device a small electric current is generated and flows in two small wires coming out the side of the device. The energy generated by the Peltier device is stored in the joule thief and periodically dumped at a voltage high enough to forward bias the LED “on” for a brief moment. Technically the LED is flashing but at a frequency too high for our eyes to see. As the hot water bath cools, the LED goes from very bright, to dim, to off in about 15 minutes.

Not a very practical power supply but still quite the parlor trick. He wraps up the tutorial specifying that a TEG thermoelectric generator would be a much better choice for generating power and can handle much higher temperatures. You can watch the video after the break.

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