Beef Up Your UPS

August 28, 2009 by Mike Szczys 54 Comments

[Surferdude] was unhappy with the decreasing life of his aging uninterruptible power supply. He decided to beef it up using marine batteries. He extended the battery connections outside of the UPS case using #10 wire and swapped the two 12 volt gel cells with the heavy duty lead-acid batteries. Doing so upgraded the device from 20 amp-hours to 84 amp-hours at a cost of about $160. If you’re thinking about taking this on yourself, pay attention to the countinuous output rating of your UPS to prevent a fire risk.

XMPP And Home Automation

August 28, 2009 by Matt Schulz 9 Comments

xmpp_office_lights

[Matthias] from Intuity Media Lab put together a nice bit on controlling office lights with XMPP from his Android phone. In the article, he explains the components involved in the project, why he chose XMPP, and lists everything you need to replicate it. The project makes use of a wide variety of tools and libraries, weaving together code from multiple languages to achieve its goal. Overall, his project is a welcome change in a world full of Twitter–based solutions.

Energy Efficient Fridge Hack

August 27, 2009 by James Munns 39 Comments

Green_Freezer

We’ve already covered a pipe bomb mini-fridge this week, but inventor [Tom Chalko] provides us with today’s fridge hack. He noticed that chest-style (laying down, see above) freezers were more energy efficient when compared to normal stand up refrigerators at the same size, despite the colder temperatures involved. This is largely due to the fact that these chest-style freezers keep cold air in like water in a bowl, even if the lid is open. He has written a very thorough report on his findings (pdf), as well as a detailed walk through of the manageable task of converting a chest-style freezer into a chest-style fridge. In the end, his fridge only used 103 Wh of electricity on the first day to reach and maintain between 4° and 7° C (39° to 45° F), and he noted that 30% of that was just getting it up to temperature. After that, the fridge only turned on for roughly 90 seconds an hour, making it a very quiet fridge as well.

Foundation Cooling

August 26, 2009 by James Munns 67 Comments

Foundation with Copper

Overclockers are always trying to come up with new, colder, and quieter ways to keep their PCs cool. [gigs] was so dedicated to this, he decided to lay 6 meters of copper pipe to use as a radiator in his new house’s foundation. As of now, the foundation is laid (copper pipes and all), and the forum posts come complete with finished slab pics, though there is no house to speak of yet.

[via Slashdot]

Open-Frame Digital Clock

August 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

Here’s an interesting project from several years ago. The clock design itself isn’t too noteworthy, but the construction is definitely inspired. You’ll notice that there is no breadboard or PCB, the frame actually is the circuit. The tubes he’s using are Numitron tubes, which aren’t as high voltage as Nixies or even VFDs. This means that there is only 12V maximum going through the exposed rails. He discusses some possible future upgrades such as LED or Nixie or VFD, but since this project is a few years old, who knows if he is still working with it.

[thanks Agent420]

Learn From The Ice Tube Clock

August 25, 2009 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

Looks like they’re at it again over at Adafruit. This time they’ve produced a clock that looks more like it should be attached to a munition rather than cruising bedside. But, geek-cred aside, there’s a lot to be learned from their design. Like we’ve grown to expect, they’ve put together some good documentation on their choice of components.

Start off by taking a peek at their 5v power regulator. There is an extra diode on the output side that prevents reverse current from the 3v backup battery. The AVR ATmega168 that controls the clock is used to detect loss of power and quickly shift to the battery backup. They’ve also used the microcontroller as a boost converter for the high voltage VFD, a nice trick we’ve seen before.

[Thanks pt]

210 LED Lamp

August 24, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 53 Comments

full-mountedLeds

Current fluorescent lamps are great for lighting large areas using very few Watts; however, LEDs are far more efficient at producing light and have less of an impact upon the environment considering there is no mercury within them. [Andrew] sent in his team’s LED florescent bulb. The first revision utilized 87 LEDs, but to increase output the second revision uses 210. The assembly can’t actually be placed in current fluorescent lamp ballasts and must use a 12 volt 1 amp power supply, but perhaps future versions will correct for this. Another problem is the relatively small viewing angle, and while there is a diffuser, we’re wondering if they have any other ideas to spread the light and adjust for the color temperature without reducing output? We wonder how it compares to some of the commercially available LED florescent lamps.