William Kamkwamba Talks Windmills With Jon Stewart

October 8, 2009 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

Last night [Jon Stewart] interviewed [William Kamkwamba] on The Daily Show. [William] is the young man from Malawi who at the age of 14 built a windmill generator out of discarded items. Now at 22 years old, [William] is working on his SAT scores in hopes that he can attend college in the US. We get a bit more insight about him and his build as he promotes his new book.

[William] was 14 when he completed the three month long build of his generator. He had previously dropped out of school because “my country was experiencing some famine”. The only resource he had at his disposal was a library that is funded by the US government (sounds like that turned out to be a good investment!).

After seeing a photograph of a windmill he was driven to succeed by the mantra: “somewhere somebody did it, it didn’t fall from the sky”. He goes on to explain how he built a circuit breaker (pictured above) to prevent a short circuit from burning his house down. Two nails are wrapped in wire with a magnet in the middle. If there is a short circuit, one of the nails will repel the magnet while the other attracts it. The nail is connect to a switch and when it moves to one side the switch is opened, breaking the circuit. Upon hearing this, [Stewart] makes the obvious comparison between [Macgyver] and [Kamkwamba].

One of the most endearing points in the interview is a story [William] shares about his first experience with the Internet. He was invited to the TED conference in 2007 and someone asked him if he’d used the Internet. Of course he hadn’t and they then started talking about using Google. When the search engine was explained to him he suggested that “windmill” be entered as a query. When millions of hits were returned his revelation was “Where was this Google all this time?”.

This is an amazing story that we can’t get enough of here at Hack a Day. Make sure you don’t miss the interview which starts 12:25 into the episode.

Growing Algae With An Arduino

October 2, 2009 by Matt Schulz 58 Comments

algae_grow

We’ve seen automated grow boxes of all shapes and sizes, but all were for growing plants. [Jared] over at Inventgeek wanted to do something similar for his algae. He started off with an Arduino-based solution that allows the controlled pulse of LEDs connected to his standard bioreactor as a prototype. Once he determined his proof of concept worked, he began work on a design based on the Arduino Pro Mini that has more advanced features such as temperature monitoring and algae culture density monitoring via some fancy IR voodoo. The code is open source and the hardware is easily obtainable, all that remains is the desire to grow algae.

Hacker Rewarded For Creating Electricity

October 2, 2009 by Mike Szczys 60 Comments

diy_windmill

[garhol] tipped us off about a self-taught hacker who brought a little light to his tiny home. [William Kamkwamba] dropped out of school because his family lacked the $80 per year for tuition. At the age of 14 he read books from the library and gained the knowledge he needed to built a 12 watt wind generator from junk parts. Wow!

We’re pretty used to hearing about creative people who end up getting punished for their hacks. Fortunately he has been rewarded for his brilliance. He’s now studying at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg with a well-deserved scholarship.

His story comes to the surface now because a book about his experiences has just been released. We need more people like this, and they should be rewarded for their efforts like he has been. We’ve put the book on our hold list at our Public Library and can’t wait to gain some knowledge from [William’s] experiences.

Check out his short talk at the TED conference, embedded after the break. Continue reading “Hacker Rewarded For Creating Electricity” →

Power Generating Backpack

October 1, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL_CUbN9F7E]

In the military, you have to carry tons of stuff. This is something we hear and see all the time. They are always trying to come up with ways to reduce the weight or quantity of the things that you bring into the field. This power generating backpack harnesses the natural up and down motion of your steps to produce power. This could reduce the amount of batteries carried into the field greatly. That’s what they say anyway, how many batteries do soldiers normally carry around? Aside from that point, we think it is pretty cool. We could see using this to keep our cell phone or GPS charged on long hiking and camping trips. You could also build something of your own to work similarly.

Seawater Cooled Data Centers

September 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 89 Comments

swac-mauritius

Remember Mauritius from High School geography? We didn’t either, but apparently it’s a small island nation east of the southern tip of Africa. It seems they are trying to develop an industry in eco-friendly data centers. The plan is to use a pipeline to gather cold water from the ocean, run it two miles to the island, and use it as inexpensive cooling. Because rooms packed with servers generate copious amounts of heat it’s easy to see how this can reduce the cost of maintaining a data center.

The thing that struck us here is, how eco-friendly is this? The article mentions that this technology is fairly mature and is already used in several places. With that in mind, isn’t this just another way to raise the temperature of the oceans, or does the environmental savings of not using electricity or gas to produce the cooling offset this?

[Thanks Vesanies]

Tapping Tree Power

September 10, 2009 by Devlin Thyne 51 Comments

[bugloaf] tipped us off about this flower power hack. University of Washington researchers, [Babak], [Brian], and [Carlton] have developed very low power circuits to run directly off of trees. This builds upon the work of MIT researchers and Voltree Power. A voltage of up to around 200mV is generated between an electrode in a tree and an electrode in the ground. Identical metals can be used as electrodes as the process is not like that of a lemon or potato battery. The significant development here is the use of a boost converter and exceptionally low power circuits. What kind of applications can you come up with for this source of power? Maybe you could try to combine this power with the power from donuts and hair.

12kW Solar Collector

September 9, 2009 by Jake W 57 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTvAL7ty53M]

Though not much info is readly available about it on the web, [Joe Carruth] is trying to build publicity (and venture capital) for his home-built solar electric generator. At its essence, it is a Stirling dish system with an adjustable composite mirror surface. This means that instead of having to rotate the entire contraption in order to follow the Sun, [Joe] only has to make the mirror segments pivot. A Stirling steam engine at the tip converts the energy into the movement used to generate electricity. Solar power plants (or ‘farms’) that are emerging are beginning to consider the advantages of using more efficient Stirling dishes rather than less efficient solar panels. If anyone has an idea as to how [Joe] can automate sun tracking for the mirrors, please post it in the comments. A couple more videos on the topic (in general) are available below: Continue reading “12kW Solar Collector” →