The SHA2017 Badge Just Keeps On Giving, This Time It’s A Solar Monitor

January 26, 2022 by Jenny List 2 Comments

Regular readers will know that we have covered the world of electronic badges for many years, and nothing pleases us more than seeing an event badge having a life afterwards rather than becoming a piece of e-waste. Thus we were especially pleased to see [Angus Gratton]’s use of a SHA2017 badge as a solar output monitor, over four years after the event.

The SHA badge used an ESP32 as its processor, and paired it with a touch keypad and an e-ink screen. Its then novel approach of having a firmware that could load MicroPython apps laid the groundwork for the successful open source badge.team firmware project, meaning that it remains versatile and useful to this day.

The solar monitor simply grabs time-series information from the database used by his web graphing system and displays it on the e-ink screen in graph form, but the interest apart from the use of the badge in his treatise on MicroPython coding. He makes the point that many of us probably follow unconsciously, writing for full-fat Python and then fixing the parts which either don’t work or use too many resources on its slimmer cousin. Finally he powers the device from an old phone charger, and shares some tips on controlling its tendency to reboot on power spikes.

It’s almost a year ago that we showed you a SHA badge being used as an environmental sensor.

Thanks [Sebastius] for the tip.

Rainwater Storing Gojo Is A Stroke Of Genius

January 24, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 57 Comments

A traditional Ethiopian Gojo. Image courtesy of easterntravelandtour.com

The traditional Ethiopian Gojo is a circular domed dwelling constructed from a central vertical beam, and a surrounding structure of curved beams made from wood or bamboo. A covering of dried grass and mud completes the outer structure. These buildings are found everywhere in rural areas, due to their ease of construction, and availability of cheap materials. One major problem living in rural areas in developing countries is access to water. Ethiopian inventor [Anteneh Gashaw] knows a thing or two about the practicalities of living in a developing nation, and has come up with an ingenious take on the traditional Gojo. The idea is to replace the outer structure with pipes capable of storing rainwater. A collector plate on the top of the roof directs rain water into the pipes — with some small balancing tubes connecting them at the bottom — distributing the stored water evenly. A tap at the bottom of structure allows the pipes to be emptied on demand. Another interesting point about this design, is that the water adds some extra weight, for free, which gives the structure much improved stability in high winds, increasing safety.

{Anteneh] notes that proper water infrastructure is incredibly expensive, and just simply won’t happen. Well digging, installation of underground water tanks, and other such stop gap measures are great, but still need significant investment, and he believes that his modified Gojo idea will help reduce the problem of storing water during the rainy season, and reduce the pressure on centralised wells and other such community-orientated solutions. What’s more, it should be cheap. We shall watch with interest where this goes.

We’ve seen a few hacks from Africa nations, not many, just a few, but they are interesting ones. Like this DIY Helicopter that didn’t quite get to fly, and this e-waste 3D printer. We’ll keep our eye peeled for more!

A tupperware-sized 3D-printed aeroponics cell, a grid-like contraption, with about 30 cloves of garlic in it, about five of them starting to grow. The cell is printed with white plastic, and there's a semi-transparent acrylic roof with LED strips attached to its underside, lifted about 3-4 inches above the garlic.

Aeroponic Cell Grows Garlic, Forwards CellSol Packets

January 16, 2022 by Arya Voronova 16 Comments

Certain pictures draw attention like no other, and that’s what happened when we stumbled upon a Twitter post about “resuscitating supermarket garlic” by [Robots Everywhere]. The more we looked at this photo, the more questions popped up, and we couldn’t resist contacting the author on Twitter – here’s what we’ve learned!

This is an aeroponics cell – a contraption that creates suitable conditions for a plant to grow. The difference of aeroponics, when compared to soil or hydroponics methods, is that the plant isn’t being submerged in soil or water. Instead, its roots are held in the air and sprayed with water mist, providing both plenty of water but also an excess of oxygen, as well as a low-resistance space for accelerated root growth – all of these factors that dramatically accelerate nutrient absorption and development of the plant. This cell design only takes up a tiny bit of space on the kitchen countertop, and, in a week’s time, at least half of the cloves have sprouted!

Much like a garlic bulb, this project has layers to it – in that this aeroponic cell is also a CellSol node! The CellSol project is a distributed communication system that can use LoRa and WiFi for its physical layer, enabling you to build widely spanning mesh networks that even lets you connect your smartphone to it where it’s called for – say, as an internet-connected hub for other devices to send their data through. We’ve covered CellSol and it’s hacker-friendliness previously, and one of the intentions of this design is to show how any device with a bit of brains and a SX1276 module can help you form a local CellSol network, or participate in some larger volunteer-driven CellSol-powered effort.

If, like us, you’re looking at this picture and thinking “this is something I’d love to see on my desk”, [Robots Everywhere] has published the STL files for making a hydroponic cell like this at home, as well as all the code involved, and some demo videos. Hopefully, the amount of aeroponics projects in our tips line is only going to increase! We’ve covered Project EDEN before, a Hackaday Prize 2017 entry that works to perfect an aeroponics approach to create an indoor greenhouse. There’s also a slew of hydroponics projects to have graced our pages, from hardware store-built to 3D printed ones!

Continue reading “Aeroponic Cell Grows Garlic, Forwards CellSol Packets” →

Haber-Bosch And The Greening Of Ammonia Production

January 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 45 Comments

We here on Earth live at the bottom of an ocean of nitrogen. Nearly 80% of every breath we take is nitrogen, and the element is a vital component of the building blocks of life. Nitrogen is critical to the backbone of proteins that form the scaffold that life hangs on and that catalyze the myriad reactions in our cells, and the information needed to build these biopolymers is encoded in nucleic acids, themselves nitrogen-rich molecules.

And yet, in its abundant gaseous form, nitrogen remains directly unavailable to higher life forms, unusably inert and unreactive. We must steal our vital supply of nitrogen from the few species that have learned the biochemical trick of turning atmospheric nitrogen into more reactive compounds like ammonia. Or at least until relatively recently, when a couple of particularly clever members of our species found a way to pull nitrogen from the air using a combination of chemistry and engineering now known as the Haber-Bosch process.

Haber-Bosch has been wildly successful, and thanks to the crops fertilized with its nitrogenous output, is directly responsible for growing the population from a billion people in 1900 to almost eight billion people today. Fully 50% of the nitrogen in your body right now probably came from a Haber-Bosch reactor somewhere, so we all quite literally depend on it for our lives. As miraculous as Haber-Bosch is, though, it’s not without its problems, particularly in this age of dwindling supplies of the fossil fuels needed to run it. Here, we’ll take a deep dive into Haber-Bosch, and we’ll also take a look at ways to potentially decarbonize our nitrogen fixation industry in the future.

Continue reading “Haber-Bosch And The Greening Of Ammonia Production” →

Keeping The Philippines’ Surface Waters Clean With Kabooms

January 2, 2022 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

[Rich] over at Tropical Ocean Cleanup on YouTube has been working hard to prevent plastic waste from getting into the waters around the Philippines. Even as a mostly one-man crew, he’s collecting large sums of plastic waste using a boom system which he fittingly made out of waste: old tires and empty plastic bottles. This Kaboom system is a low-cost method of capturing any waste so that it can be collected and properly disposed of. In addition [Rich] also installs containers where locals can dispose of their plastic trash.

The Kaboom system is detailed by [Rich] in this video (also linked after the break). As a shoestring budget project, it relies heavily on donations and local support to install more of these booms. It is however a highly effective way to prevent such common plastic waste from making it into the oceans in the first place. Having these booms made out of waste items that are commonly found where humans roam should make this a snap.

Ideally, local governments would be installing such capturing systems and easy waste disposal options, but sometimes it seems grassroots efforts like these are what will bring the fastest change.

Curious about what to do with all that plastic waste once you collect and identify it? How about making some plastic bricks?

Continue reading “Keeping The Philippines’ Surface Waters Clean With Kabooms” →

Modern Toilet Generates Energy

December 29, 2021 by Chris Lott 44 Comments

Environmental Engineering [Prof Jaeweon Cho] at South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology specializes in water and waste management. He has developed an energy-generating toilet called BeeVi (pronounced beevee) that recycles your waste in three ways. Liquid waste is processed in a microbial reaction tank to make a liquid fertilizer. Solid waste is pumped into an anaerobic digestion tank, which results in methane gas used to power a silicone oxide fuel cell to make electricity. The remaining solids are composted to make fertilizer. The daily waste from one person is about 500 g, which can generate about 50 L of methane.

The BeeVi toilets, located on the UNIST campus, pay students in a digital currently called Ggools, or Honey Money in English. Each deposit earns 10 Ggools, which can be used to purchase coffee, instant noodles, and other items (one Ggool is equivalent to about $3.00 value). The output from this pilot project is used to partially power the building on campus, and to fertilize gardens on the grounds. If you want to learn more, here is a video lecture by [Prof Cho] (in English).

Waste management is an area of research around the world. The Gates Foundation has been funding research into this field for ten years, and has held a number of expos over the years highlighting innovative solutions, most recently being the 2018 Reinvent the Toilet Expo in Beijing. We wrote a piece about the future of toilets last year as well.

Continue reading “Modern Toilet Generates Energy” →

Weather Station Dumps CR2032 Cells, Gains 18650

December 16, 2021 by Tom Nardi 34 Comments

Despite the fact that we’re rapidly approaching the year 2022, there are still an incredible number of gadgets out there that you’re expected to power with disposable batteries. Sure you can buy rechargeable stand-ins that come in the various shapes and sizes of the traditional alkaline cells, but that’s a stopgap at best. For some, if a new gadget doesn’t feature an internal Li-ion battery and standardized USB charging, it’s a non-starter.

[Danilo Larizza] is one of those people. Bothered by the fact that his Oregon Scientific weather station required a pair of CR2032 coin cells, he set out to replace them with an integrated rechargeable solution. The conversion ending up being easier to implement than he initially expected, and by his calculations, his solution should keep the unit up and running for nearly 40 days before needing to be topped off with a standard USB charger.

The first step was determining how much power it actually took to run the weather station. Although the two CR2032 cells were wired in series, and therefore providing a nominal 6 V, he determined through experimentation with a bench power supply that it would run on as little as 3.2 volts. This coincides nicely with the voltage range for a single 18650 cell, and meant he didn’t need to add a boost converter into the mix. He notes the weather station does flash a “Low Battery” warning most of the time now, but that seems a fair price to pay.

Confident in the knowledge that the weather station could happily run with an 18650 cell connected in place of the original CR2032s, all [Danilo] needed to do was figure out a way to charge the battery up from time to time. To that end, he reached for a common TP4056 module. This handy little board is a great match for 18650 cells, and is so cheap that there’s really no excuse not to have a few of them kicking around your parts bin. You never know when you might need to teach an old gadget new tricks.