Tapping Tree Power

September 10, 2009 by Devlin Thyne 51 Comments

[bugloaf] tipped us off about this flower power hack. University of Washington researchers, [Babak], [Brian], and [Carlton] have developed very low power circuits to run directly off of trees. This builds upon the work of MIT researchers and Voltree Power. A voltage of up to around 200mV is generated between an electrode in a tree and an electrode in the ground. Identical metals can be used as electrodes as the process is not like that of a lemon or potato battery. The significant development here is the use of a boost converter and exceptionally low power circuits. What kind of applications can you come up with for this source of power? Maybe you could try to combine this power with the power from donuts and hair.

Tweet-a-Watt Wins Greener Gadgets Design Competition

February 27, 2009 by Eliot 28 Comments

tweetawatt

The team behind the the Tweet-a-Watt/Wattcher just won first prize at the Greener Gadgets design competition. The device is a hacked Kill A Watt that transmits power consumption using an XBee. After checking out DVICE’s preview of the competitors yesterday, we’re happy to see a prototype win instead of just a concept sketch.

Wattcher, Twittering Kill A Watt Plans Posted

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

You probably saw [Phillip Torrone] and [Limor Fried]’s twittering Kill A Watt earlier this week. It was an entry in the Core77/Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We saw a little bit about how it was assembled, but now they’ve posted a full guide to assembling the hardware. Each Kill A Watt gets an XBee radio that transmits back to a receiver that logs the power usage. The difficult part when putting this design together was the XBee required 50mA when transmitting. This is well above the Kill A Watt’s internal power supply. They remedied this by adding a 10,000uF supercap to act as a rechargeable battery. The daily twittering is just a side-effect of the project. The Kill A Watts transmit every 2 seconds, so you’ll get a very accurate report of your power usage. This is a great project for renters who can’t permanently modify their power infrastructure. Each Kill A Watt can support quite a few appliances since they’re rated for 15A, ~1800W.

USB Power From Your VGA Port

November 26, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 41 Comments

vga_usb

[gmgfarrand] needed an extra USB port to power some devices. Since he just needed power, and no data, he slapped together this quick adapter that pulls power from the vga port instead. While we’re not sure if this could possibly damage your video card if you pull too much power from it, we’re happy to see someone being original. That VGA port goes unused so often, this adapter might just make it a tad more useful.

[thanks Adam]

SSD Hard Drives Tank Laptop Battery Life

July 1, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 16 Comments

Tom’s Hardware has been running some tests to challenge the common assumption that SSD hard drives use power more efficiently than magnetic plate drives. Their results were quite definitive: not only are they not as energy efficient, SSDs actually use more power than conventional hard drives.

What they found is that most plate drives are at peak consumption (up to 4W) when accessing files fragmented across the media, which causes the actuator to move back and forth across the media several times. However, this is almost never sustained for extended periods of time; the actuator usually doesn’t move much when reading unfragmented data, and most plate drives are also capable of going idle when they are not in use.

Most SSDs on the other hand, only have two states: on and off. This means that when they are on, they are always at peak energy consumption. Though this number hovers around 2W for most of the SSDs they tested, over prolonged periods this can mean a great deal more power consumption than is immediately apparent, which can have short and long term effects on the battery life of a laptop. See the Tom’s Hardware article for benchmarks of specific products and more in-depth data.

Non-destructive Breakdown Voltage Tester

June 23, 2008 by Will O'Brien 4 Comments

This applies more to older vacuum technology than your average solid state hardware, but [Richard] put together an interesting project. It’s designed to test a component for its breakdown voltage without destroying it. The general idea of the ‘BVT’ is to increase the voltage applied to a device until some current leakage is detected. Of course, any device that includes notes on probable arc length in relation to kilovolts is awesome by definition.

Parasitic Power Devices

June 1, 2008 by Sean Percival 25 Comments

Aside from having a very cool name, parasitic power is an innovate way to recapture already spent power. This power can come in the form of wasted heating or cooling of a building for example. Last week the Southern Methodist University activated the first commercial Green Machine from ElectraTherm. The unit recycles residual heat from the building into electricity. So far, the 50kW Green Machine has exceeded expectations. The company also says owners can recoup the units cost after about three years.