Watering The Garden With A Solar-Powered System

July 22, 2022 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

Watering the garden is important to do regularly if you want your plants to thrive. [Nikodem Bartnik] built a system to handle it for him, keeping his garden on the grow.

The system has an Arduino commanding an irrigation system based around a pump delivering water from a reservoir. It’s paired with a water level sensor to keep an eye on the water available to the system. Moisture sensors are also used to monitor the prevailing soil conditions, to ensure the plants aren’t over- or under-watered. In this case, [Nikodem] designed his own resistive moisture sensors, which proved difficult but taught him a lot along the way. verything was then wrapped up in a food container to make it waterproof for installation outside. A solar panel and charging system was also installed to power the whole setup without requiring a mains connection.

While this system worked, the moisture sensors were a bit unreliable and there was a lot of cabling involved. A second revision got rid of the sensors and used a Pi Pico to implement a simple timer-based irrigation scheme.

Either way, both systems worked and helped keep the vital water flowing to the garden bed. Automatic plant watering is a bit of a popular theme around here, and we’ve seen some nifty hacks in that realm of late. Video after the break.

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Dead Solar Panels Are The Hottest New Recyclables

July 19, 2022 by Lewin Day 99 Comments

When it comes to renewable energy, there are many great sources. Whether it’s solar, wind, or something else, though, we need a lot of it. Factories around the globe are rising to the challenge to provide what we need.

We can build plenty of new solar panels, of course, but we need to think about what happens when they reach end of life. As it turns out, with so much solar now out in the field, a major new recycling industry may be just around the corner.

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Weed Eater String Made From Plastic Bottles

July 12, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 29 Comments

For those who don’t mind constantly adding tiny but measurable amounts of microplastics to their landscaping, string trimmers are an excellent way of maintaining edging around garden beds, trimming weeds, or maintaining ground covers on a steep hill. One problem with them, though, is that not only is the string consumable but it can be expensive. Plus, if you have a trimmer with a proprietary spool you need to hope the company never goes out of business. Or, you can simply refill your string spool with this handy tool.

The build uses plastic bottles to create the string from what would likely become garbage anyway. First, a sharp roller-style knife slices the plastic into a long thin strip. Once cut, it is fed through a heater similar to a hot end on a 3D printer which allows the plastic to be deformed or forged into a cylinder. From there the plastic is added onto a spool, which also has the motor in it that drives the entire mechanism. In this case it is using an old variable-speed drill.

From the comments on the video, there is some discussion about the economics of using this string in a weed eater. It’s likely the plastic won’t last as long as specialty string trimmer string, and the time and expense of making the plastic may never save much money. But we have to give credit to the ingenuity nonetheless. And, if you’re really into recycling plastic just for the sake of keeping it out of the landfill, there are plenty of other ways to go about accomplishing that goal.

I will NEVER buy weed whip line again! from landscaping

Same Taste With Less Energy: Optimizing The Way We Cook Food

July 8, 2022 by Maya Posch 159 Comments

Preparing food is the fourth most energy-intensive activity in a household. While there has been a lot of effort on the first three — space heating, water heating, and electrical appliances — most houses still use stoves and ovens that are not too dissimilar to those from half a century ago.

More recent technologies that make cooking more efficient and pleasant have been developed, such as induction heating. Other well-known and common appliances are secretly power savers: microwaves and electric kettles. In addition, pressure cookers enable the shortening of cooking times, and for those who like dishes that take hours to simmer, vacuum-insulated pans can be a real energy-saver.

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Sea Level Rise From Melting Ice Sheets Could Soon Be Locked In

June 23, 2022 by Lewin Day 124 Comments

Where today we talk broadly of climate change and it’s various effects, the conversation was once simpler. We called it “global warming” and fretted about cooking outside in the summer and the sea level rise that would claim so many of our favorite cities.

Scientists are now concerned that sea level rises could be locked in, as ice sheets and glaciers pass “tipping points” beyond which their loss cannot be stopped. Research is ongoing to determine how best we can avoid these points of no return.

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Machine Learning Does Its Civic Duty By Spotting Roadside Litter

June 22, 2022 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

If there’s one thing that never seems to suffer from supply chain problems, it’s litter. It’s everywhere, easy to spot and — you’d think — pick up. Sadly, most of us seem to treat litter as somebody else’s problem, but with something like this machine vision litter mapper, you can at least be part of the solution.

For the civic-minded [Nathaniel Felleke], the litter problem in his native San Diego was getting to be too much. He reasoned that a map of where the trash is located could help municipal crews with cleanup, so he set about building a system to search for trash automatically. Using Edge Impulse and a collection of roadside images captured from a variety of sources, he built a model for recognizing trash. To find the garbage, a webcam with a car window mount captures images while driving, and a Raspberry Pi 4 runs the model and looks for garbage. When roadside litter is found, the Pi uses a Blues Wireless Notecard to send the GPS location of the rubbish to a cloud database via its cellular modem.

Cruising around the streets of San Diego, [Nathaniel]’s system builds up a database of garbage hotspots. From there, it’s pretty straightforward to pull the data and overlay it on Google Maps to create a heatmap of where the garbage lies. The video below shows his system in action.

Yes, driving around a personal vehicle specifically to spot litter is just adding more waste to the mix, but you’d imagine putting something like this on municipal vehicles that are already driving around cities anyway. Either way, we picked up some neat tips, especially those wireless IoT cards. We’ve seen them used before, but [Nathaniel]’s project gives us a path forward on some ideas we’ve had kicking around for a while.

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Throw Out That Box? No, Build A Shelving Unit

June 9, 2022 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

Are you one of those people who hoards cardboard for someday, and then periodically breaks it all down and puts it out for recycling because you haven’t done anything with it yet? Well, load up a new blade in the utility knife and fire up that hot glue gun, because the [Cardboard Ninja]’s gonna show you how to make a shelving unit from the biggest box in your collection.

[Cardboard Ninja] goes about the build quite smartly, cutting the legs from the four long bends already in the cardboard. This is repeated in the shelves, which are made from the box’s sides — [Cardboard Ninja] takes advantage of the bends when it comes to cutting out the shelves and creates the other three with the edge of a metal ruler. The rest of the cardboard is devoted to supports for shelves and legs.

While you could use this unit to hold all the other, smaller boxen you have lying around, that would be a gross under-utilization. You see, the way this is put together, it can hold upwards of 133 lbs (60 kg) total, provided the rules of weight distribution are followed, and the heaviest things are on the bottom shelf.

That does seem like a lot of weight, but given that this was constructed by someone who has a holster for their utility knife and calls themselves [Cardboard Ninja], I think we can trust their stress tests and just go with it. Given that, it’s always a good idea to anchor shelving units to the wall.

You know, this would make a pretty good entry into the second Challenge of this year’s Hackaday Prize. Remember: this is the final weekend to enter, and the window closes at 7AM Pacific on Sunday, so get hackin’!

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