generator

102 Articles

the full charger with gas tank and engine

Charge Your Apple With Apples

April 19, 2022 by 16 Comments

When you think of ethanol, you might think of it as a type of alcohol, not alcohol itself. However, in reality, it is the primary ingredient in adult beverages. Which means humans have gotten quite good at making it, as we’ve been doing for a long time. With this in mind, [Sam Barker] decided to make ethanol out of apples to power a small engine to charge his phone.

The steps for making pure ethanol is quite similar to making alcoholic cider. A friend of [Sam’s] had an orchard and a surplus of apples, so [Sam] boiled them down and stored the mush in jugs. He added activated dry yeast to start the fermentation process. A dry lock allowed the CO2 gas that was being created to escape. Over a few weeks, the yeast converted all the sugar into ethanol and gas. In the meantime, [Sam] sourced a chainsaw and adapted the engine to run on ethanol, as ethanol needs to run richer than gasoline. The video below the break tells the story.

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Pedal Powered Power

March 14, 2022 by 19 Comments

When you have a solar-powered web server, where do you go next for a source of power? Instead of lazily mooching off the sun, you can use your muscle with a bike generator. [Ed note: The site is run on an entirely solar-powered server, so if it’s the middle of the night, you might have a better web experience here.]

We’ve covered bicycle generators before, so what’s new? For starters, the accessibility of chargers and batteries has changed significantly. Rather than just charging a phone or putting out a measly 5V, this bike can be integrated into an existing solar PV system and output many voltages. This guide goes over building one with hand tools with great detail.

It starts with a 1950’s vintage exercise bicycle, no hacksaw required. A friction drive connects a generator and makes for an incredibly compact generator/exercise machine. Calculating the correct gear ratio is crucial to getting the 12 volts out at an average pedaling speed. You want your range of voltages to be between 5 and 24 volts. With the help of a control panel provides 5v, 12v, 14.4v, and 220v to power a variety of devices. Boost and buck converters output these voltages (depending on whether the voltage needs to be set for a maximum or a minimum). A potentiometer allows you to dial back the power draw of certain appliances (an electric kettle, for instance), making a workout a tad easier on the human component of the generator.

Another key takeaway from this guide is using a wind charge controller to charge batteries. A solar charge controller will just cut the circuit when the batteries are full. A wind charge controller will increase the load until the motor breaks. Some controllers are also hybrid wind and solar, allowing you to connect a small panel like the one running the webserver this guide is posted on and then charge up the batteries when it has been overcast for a few days in a row.

Hub-powered bike computer

Battery-less Bike Computer Gets Power And Data From The Wheels

December 31, 2021 by 6 Comments

Bicycle generator technology has advanced far beyond the bottle dynamos of years past, which as often as not would introduce enough drag when engaged to stall the bike. Granted, it’s not as much of a current draw as a big old incandescent headlight, but this wheel-powered cyclocomputer is a great example of harvesting both power and data from the rotation of a bike’s wheel.

While there are plenty of cyclocomputers available commercially, [Lukas] was looking for some specific features. His main goal was something usable at night, which means a backlit display, ruling out the usually coin-cell power sources. His bike’s hub dynamo offered interesting possibilities — not only does it provide AC power, but its output frequency is proportional to the bike’s speed. This allows him to derive speed, distance, RPM, time-in-motion, and other parameters to display on the 1×8 character LCD display. There’s some clever circuitry needed to condition the output of the hub dynamo, and a 1.5 farad supercapacitor keeps the unit powered for about four days when the bike isn’t in motion.

As for measuring the frequency of the dynamo’s output, [Lukas] simply used a digital input on the MSP430 microcontroller, with a little signal conditioning of course. He also added a barometer chip for altitude data, plus an ambient light sensor to control the LCD backlight. Everything lives in a clever 3D-printed case with a minimalist but thoughtful design that docks and undocks from the bike easily; [Lukas] assures us that a waterproof version of the case is in the works.

We really appreciate the elegance of this design, and the way it uses the data that’s embedded in the power supply. While [Lukas] appears to have used a commercially available generator, we’ve seen other examples of home-brew hub dynamos before — even one that offers regenerative braking.

Acordeonador, an 555 accordion powered by a CD player based genrator

CD Player Powered 555 Piano Goes Accordion To Plan

December 30, 2021 by 8 Comments

Ah yes, the 555 piano project. Be it the Atari Punk Console, or some other 555 based synthesizer, Hackers just love to hear what the 555 can do when attached to a few passives and a speaker. It’s a sound to behold. But for [Berna], that wasn’t quite enough! Below the break, you can see his creation, called the Acordeonador.

A portmanteau of the Spanish words for “Accordion” and Generator”, the Acordeonador does what no project we’ve seen so far can do: It turns a CD drive into a generator for a 555 based synthesizer.

To give the Acordeonador a more analog feeling, a large 4700uf electrolytic capacitor stores just enough energy to make the music generation more than an on/off affair. It’s a great effect, and it works well! Not being one to leave any details out, [Berna] prototyped the build on perf board and then covered the board in what appears to be an wood grained contact paper, giving it that 1970’s dual keyboard electric organ feel.

It really just goes to prove that a 555 project can be the source of a great time! Hackaday is rife with 555 projects, but if you enjoy this, be sure to check out The Most Important Device In the Universe, which is of course powered by a 555. Continue reading “CD Player Powered 555 Piano Goes Accordion To Plan” →

3D Printed Generator Build Highlights The Scientific Method

December 1, 2021 by 6 Comments

Sometimes we build to innovate, and sometimes we build just to have the satisfaction of saying we made it ourselves. Yet there is another reason to construct something ourselves: To learn, just as [Fraens] has done with this 3D-printed generator. (Video, embedded below.)

[Fraens] starts off with a jig for winding the individual coils, but then the jig itself snaps into a the stator ring. The stator ring is sandwiched by two rotors which rotate on a brass shaft suspended by needle bearings. With the exception of the hardware, all the structural parts are 3d printed.

What really separates the generator build isn’t how it’s built, but rather how [Fraens] has put it to use as tool for learning and experimentation. By plotting input torque vs electrical output, [Fraens] is able to calculate efficiencies in multiple configurations, and has some interesting conclusions to share toward the end of the video. We appreciate how the documentation and analysis help iterate the design towards higher efficiency and will inform the next build.

With some more work, we can see this going straight into a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine or attached to a Pelton Wheel for an off-grid hydro-power setup. Thanks to [Shabab] for the great Tip!

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Magnetic Bearings Put The Spin On This Flywheel Battery

July 22, 2021 by 35 Comments

[Tom Stanton] is right about one thing: flywheels make excellent playthings. Whether watching a spinning top that never seems to slow down, or feeling the weird forces a gyroscope exerts, spinning things are oddly satisfying. And putting a flywheel to work as a battery makes it even cooler.

Of course, using a flywheel to store energy isn’t even close to being a new concept. But the principles [Tom] demonstrates in the video below, including the advantages of magnetically levitated bearings, are pretty cool to see all in one place. The flywheel itself is just a heavy aluminum disc on a shaft, with a pair of bearings on each side made of stacks of neodymium magnets. An additional low-friction thrust bearing at the end of the shaft keeps the systems suitably constrained, and allows the flywheel to spin for twelve minutes or more.

[Tom]’s next step was to harness some of the flywheel’s angular momentum to make electricity. He built a pair of rotors carrying more magnets, with a stator of custom-wound coils sandwiched between. A full-wave bridge rectifier and a capacitor complete the circuit and allow the flywheel to power a bunch of LEDs or even a small motor. The whole thing is nicely built and looks like a fun desk toy.

This is far from [Tom]’s first flywheel rodeo; his last foray into storing mechanical energy wasn’t terribly successful, but he has succeeded in making flywheels fly, one way or another.

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Black Starts: How The Grid Gets Restarted

July 15, 2021 by 96 Comments

Gripped as we are at the time of this writing by a historic heatwave, it’s hard for those of us in the western United States to picture a time when cold and ice reigned across the land. But really, it was only about four months back that another bit of freakish weather was visited across most of the country, including places ill-equipped to deal with the consequences. The now-fabled “February Freeze” left millions, mostly in Texas, scrabbling about in the dark and cold as a series of cascading engineering failures took apart their electrical grid, piece by piece, county by county.

The event has been much discussed and dissected, as an event with such far-reaching impact should be. Like much discussion these days, precious little of it is either informed or civil, and that’s not good news for those seeking to understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, or at least to mitigate the effects somewhat. Part of that is understandable, given the life-disrupting and often life-threatening situations the disaster forced people to suddenly face. It’s also difficult for people to discuss an event so widespread in its scope and impact — there’s just too much for anyone to wrap their head around.

To make the present discussion a little easier, we’ll be focusing on one aspect of the February grid crash that’s often bandied about but rarely explained: that the Texas grid was mere minutes away from collapsing completely, and that it would have taken weeks or months to restore had it been able to slip away. Is that really possible? Can the power grid just “go away” completely and suddenly? The answer, sadly, is yes, but thankfully a lot of thought has been put into not only preventing it from happening but also how to restart everything if it does happen, by performing what’s known as a “Black Start.”

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