Power Your Home With A Water Battery

October 8, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 69 Comments

I’ve stated it before on Hackaday but one of the most interesting engineering challenges posed to me this year was “how could you store enough energy to power a decent portion of a home for several hours without using batteries, all while staying within the size of a typical suburban plot?” [Quint Builds] attempts something up that alley by using solar power to pump water up onto his roof and later releasing it for power generation. (Video, embedded below.)

Earlier [Quint] had built a water collecting system using his gutters and a bell siphon but wasn’t satisfied with the overall power output. Using the turbine he had created for that system, he put a 55-gallon drum on top of his roof with the help of some supporting structures. We’d like to advise the public to consult a professional before adding a large heavy weight on top of your roof, but [Quint] forges ahead after studying his trusses and determining it to be a risk he is willing to take. A solar panel runs a small pump that pumps water from a reservoir up to the top of the roof when the sun shines with a float switch in the roof barrel stopping the motor once it’s full. A valve at the bottom allows water to spin the turbine and fill back into the bottom reservoir, forming a closed loop. There were a few snags along the way with prototype circuits not being fully contacted and the motor needing water cooling, an issue fixed by a custom CNC’d heat sink. The fixes for the various issues are almost as entertaining to see as the actual system itself.

It’s incredible to see lights come on powered by water alone but also sobering to realize just how much water you’d need to power a typical home. Perhaps if [Quint] upgrades, he can swap out the small motor for a larger 3D printed water pump.

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Snails, Sensors, And Smart Dust: The Michigan Micro Mote

October 4, 2021 by Robin Kearey 17 Comments

If you want to track a snail, you need a tiny instrumentation package. How do you create an entire data acquisition system, including sensors, memory, data processing and a power supply, small enough to fit onto a snail’s shell?

Throughout history, humans have upset many ecosystems around the world by introducing invasive species. Australia’s rabbits are a famous example, but perhaps less well-known are the Giant African land snails (Lissachatina fulica) that were introduced to South Pacific islands in the mid-20th century. Originally intended as a food source (escargot africain, anyone?), they quickly turned out to be horrible pests, devouring local plants and agricultural crops alike.

Not to be deterred, biologists introduced another snail, hoping to kill off the African ones: the Rosy Wolfsnail (Euglandina rosea), native to the Southeastern United States. This predatory snail did not show great interest in the African intruders however, and instead went on to decimate the indigenous snail population, driving dozens of local species into extinction.

A snail with a solar sensor attached to its shell — A Rosy Wolfsnail carrying a light sensing Micro Mote on its back. Source: Cindy S. Bick et al., 2021

One that managed to survive the onslaught is a small white snail called Partula hyalina. Confined to the edges of the tropical forests of Tahiti, biologists hypothesized that it was able to avoid the predators by hiding in sunny places which were too bright for E. rosea. The milky-white shells of P. hyalina supposedly protected them from overheating by reflecting more sunlight than the wolf snails’ orange-brown ones.

This sounds reasonable, but biologists need proof. So a team from the University of Michigan set up an experiment to measure the amount of solar radiation experienced by both snail types. They attached tiny light sensors to the wolf snails’ shells and then released them again. The sensors measured the amount of sunlight seen by the animals and logged this information during a full day. The snails were then caught again and the data retrieved, and the results proved the original hypothesis.

So much for science, but exactly how did they pull this off? Continue reading “Snails, Sensors, And Smart Dust: The Michigan Micro Mote” →

A tiny solar-powered robot that even works indoors

Tiny BEAM Robot Smiles Big At The Sun

September 25, 2021 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

What have you been working on during the Great Chip Shortage? [NanoRobotGeek] has been living up to their handle and building BEAM robots that are smaller than any we’ve seen before. What are BEAM robots, you say? Technically it stands for Biology Electronics Aesthetics and Mechanics, but basically the idea is to mimic the movement of bugs, usually with found components, and often with solar power. Here’s a bunch of tutorials to get you started.

The underbelly of what might be the world's smallest BEAM robot. — This was before the large, flat storage capacitor came and covered everything up.

This here is an example of a photovore or photopopper — it moves toward light using simple logic by charging up a capacitor and employing a voltage monitor to decide when there’s enough to run two tiny vibration motors that make up its legs and feet.

[NanoRobotGeek] started in a great place when they found these 25% efficient monocrystalline solar panels. They will even make the bot move indoors! If you want to build one of these, you can’t beat [NanoRobotGeek]’s guide. Be sure to watch it toddle around in the demo video after the break.

We love to see people work at all different scales. Last time we checked in with [NanoRobotGeek], they had built this solar-powered ball-flinging delight.

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Rugged Solar Generator Packs A Punch

September 7, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 29 Comments

Hackaday Prize 2021 entrant [Philip Ian Haasnoot] has been building a well-polished power bank. But this is no ordinary little power bank the like you would throw in your rucksack for a day out. No, this 2.5 kW luggable power bank is neatly encased in a tough, waterproof Pelican 1550 case, and is suitably decked out with all the power sockets you could possibly need for a long weekend of wilderness camping and photography.

Testing the hand-built 18650 based battery bank — Boy, that’s a lot of tab welding

This box sports USB-C and USB 3.0 connectors for gadget charging, as well as 12 VDC cigarette lighter and XT-60 ports for high-drag devices. Also it provides a pair of 120 VAC sockets via an integrated inverter, which at 1.5 kW could run a small heater if you were really desperate, but more likely useful to keep your laptop going for a while. Now if only you could get Wi-Fi out in the desert!

[Philip] doesn’t actually talk much about the solar panels themselves, but we know the box contains a 600 W MPPT boost converter to take solar power in, and feed the LiPo battery pack in the correct manner.

The battery pack is custom-made from salvaged and tested 18650 cells, as you would expect, which we reckon took an absolute age to make by hand. The whole project is nicely finished, and looks like something we’d be happy to throw in the back of the car before heading out into our local wilderness.

As [Philip] says in the project description, it’s a tough job to carry enough power and keep all his drones, cameras and lighting equipment charged, not mention helping prevent the campsite occupants from freezing overnight during the chilly Arizona nights.

Many power bank designs have graced these fair pages over the years, like this rather polished build, and long may they continue to do so.

Making Ferroelectric Solar Cells Better

August 14, 2021 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Researchers claim that using several very thin layers of ferroelectric crystals can lead to significantly better ferroelectric solar cell efficiency. But don’t pull the panels off your roof yet. Conventional cells are still much more efficient than ferroelectric devices — at least, for now.

Unlike conventional silicon-based solar cells, ferroelectric cells don’t depend on a PN junction and — in theory — can be cheaper and easier to produce. However, they typically don’t absorb as much sunlight as other materials.

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Building A Solar Powered Game Boy Pocket

August 8, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 5 Comments

Light has always been a key part of the classic Game Boy experience. Some of us have fond memories of riding along in the back seat of a car at night, pausing and unpausing the game as the street lights overhead briefly give enough light to see the unlit display. The availability of third party IPS displays for these classic handhelds has largely eradicated this problem today, but as you might expect, the increased power requirements of the more modern screen reduces the system’s runtime.

As part of their examination into energy production, the [Houston Museum of Natural Science] set out to see if they could improve things by adding a solar panel to the back of a Game Boy Pocket that had already been modified with an IPS display. The Pocket version of the Game Boy was selected as it has a nice flat back that made it easy to attach a solar panel, and in fact the panel sourced for this mod is so well dimensioned, it almost looks like the device came that way.

In the video below, you can see the modification starts by cutting away a large section of the Game Boy’s rear panel to fit the 1000 mAh LiPo battery. The solar panel is then affixed over the back with super glue. A diode is soldered onto the solar cell, and then wired into a charge controller that came with USB-C input. The placement of the charge controller ended up being trickier than expected, but with a little hot glue, it works just fine. Overall this is a simple mod but a brilliant idea.

This isn’t the first solar-powered handheld game system we’ve seen, but it’s nice to see the idea revisited and expanded on, particularly regarding ergonomics. In addition, we love the incredible detail of narration that’s given as this hack slowly takes shape. Video after the break.

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The Magnetosphere Has A Ton Of Energy. Can A Guitar Amp Company Tap Into It?

August 7, 2021 by Jenny List 55 Comments

Researching a piece on vacuum tubes, we stumbled on something unexpected from Electro-Harmonix, best known for guitar amplifiers and audio tube manufacture. In a break from their core business, they plan to tap energy from the magnetosphere. This came as something of a surprise to their guitarist customers who were no doubt expecting a fancy new effects pedal, but it seems they’re serious.

The magnetosphere is the region of space surrounding the earth in which the earth’s magnetic field has most influence, and unlike the tidy pattern of magnetic field surrounding a bar magnet that you might have seen with iron filings at school, it’s distorted by the constant buffeting of the solar wind. This means that a significant quantity of potential energy is stored in its compression, and it’s this energy that Electro-Harmonix have their eye on.

Like Fox Mulder: we want to believe. Unfortunately the trouble with such ideas is readily visible with a quick web search; they attract a significant number of what one might charitably call cranks, and there is no shortage of unsubstantiated claims surrounding conspiracy theories, silenced genus inventors, and their mystery devices. Weird and wonderful descriptions and cryptic circuit diagrams abound, so separating the wheat if there is any from the inevitable chaff becomes a challenge. We respect that the Electro-Harmonix team are professional engineers who we hope are unlikely to become caught up in the weirder part of the Internet, but we’ll reserve our judgement until they provide more technical details of what they propose.

Header: NASA, Public domain.