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.
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.
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.
While most of us have been content with swing and sliding doors for the vast majority of our needs around the home, the revolving door remains popular in a wide variety of contexts.
It’s a confounding contraption that always feels ready to snatch and ensnare the unwary user. However, these doors do have certain benefits that have allowed them to retain popularity in many public buildings around the world. Let’s dive in to why below.
Generally when we consider the many plants around us, we imagine them efficiently using the electromagnetic radiation from the Sun via photosynthesis in their leaves — pulling carbon-dioxide from the air, as well as water from the soil via their roots, and grow as quickly as they reasonably can. In reality, the efficiency of this process is less than 10% of the input energy, and the different types of plant metabolisms that have formed over the course of evolution aren’t all the same.
Among the plant metabolisms in use today, some use significantly more efficient carbon fixation pathways, while others end up wasting a lot of the energy they obtained from photosynthesis with unnecessarily complicated processes, especially to deal with waste. How fast plants can grow if they had all evolved the most efficient carbon fixation pathway has been the subject of a number of studies these past decades, involving everything from crop plants to trees.
As these studies are showing us, more than a scientific and evolutionary biological curiosity, these genetically engineered plants offer real opportunities in everything from food production to reforestation.
Where has the year gone? It’s already summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the second Challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize ends this weekend, along with your chance at one of ten $500 prizes. If you thrive on last-minute challenges, consider the eleventh hour upon you. But don’t panic; there’s still a decent amount of time left to start a new project over on Hackaday.io and get it entered into the contest.
The second Challenge focuses on creating new ways of recycling materials. What does this look like? That’s a pretty broad topic, but it could be anything from a better method of chip harvesting to an inexpensive and/or low-energy process for shredding used plastic and forming it into millable blocks.
Don’t just think big on a commercial scale — imagine what people can do at home with the stuff in their recycle bin or their neighbor’s trash. If everyone had access to one of [Jerzeek]’s plastic scanners for identifying the type of plastic that mystery bucket or old watering can was made of, just think what could be done. As long as your project focuses on reusing, recycling, or revamping, we want to see it!
[jude_pullen] is vacu-forming plastic milk jugs ’til the cows come home.
[Guillermo Perez Guillen]’s cornstarch mini pottery machine spins us right round.
So basically, we have a bunch of awesome entries right now, but we don’t have yours! Remember: it doesn’t have to be a new project, just a new project page. Did you revolutionize recycling during lockdown? Make a new project and tell us about it! Just don’t forget to actually enter the thing by using the drop-down on the left before 7AM PDT on Sunday, June 12th. Need a time converting countdown thingy? We’ve got you.
After the recycle bin is empty, we’ll be moving on immediately to the Hack It Back challenge. This time, we’ll be asking you to teach old tech new tricks, or to bring a piece of gear back from the dead. Turn a blender into a Dremel-like tool, or give an old ‘scope a screen upgrade. You know what to do!
As part of [Erich Styger]’s recent kitchen overhaul with more power-efficient machines, he came across the ‘AutoDos’ feature of the new Miele G 27695-60 dishwasher. These are essentially overpriced containers of dishwashing powder that go into a special compartment of the machine, from which the dishwasher can then dispense the powder as needed. The high price tag and purported single-use of these containers led to the obvious question of whether they can be refilled.
With a cost of over $10 per PowerDisk container, each containing 400 grams of powder that suffice for ~20 cycles, it should be obvious that this is not a cheap system. Fortunately, each PowerDisk is just a foil-covered plastic container with no real special components. This meant that one hole and some funnel action later, [Erich] had refilled an empty PowerDisk with fresh powder, with the Miele dishwasher happily purring away and none the wiser that it wasn’t using Genuine Miele PowerDisk Dishwasher Powder™.
How well this system holds up long-term is uncertain, as the containers were not designed for constant reuse, but it offers the perspective of some creative 3D printing to create an (ABS-based?) container alternative. Having a automatic powder or liquid dosing system in a dishwasher is a pretty useful feature, but when it gets tied to what is clearly a cash grab, it rather ruins the deal.
