Hackszine.com: Energy Archives

Archive: Energy

April 21, 2008

Post your Earth Day hacks

In celebration of my favorite planet, I'd like to open the comments up to any and all Earth Day hacks, links and activities. Think of it as an opportunity to quickly catalog a list of ideas and tools that can be used for the other 364 days of the year.

Here are a few simple things that you can do tomorrow. I figure it's as good a day as any to start forming a few practical habits, so for my list, I just chose a number of things that you can easily make a regular part of your day.

Bike to work. If you need to find a route, citybikemap.com is a good user contributed resource
Compost the garbage. If you don't have a composter, here are some construction ideas from Instructables: Sinmple Pentagon Composter; Mini Wooden Portable Compost Bin; Trench Composter
Avoid the purchase of anything with excess packaging
Turn lights off when not in use. Convert remaining incandescent bulbs to CFL
Check faucets and toilets for leaky valves. For your toilets, shut off the water while you are at work and see if the water level goes down in the tank. It's a common problem that's easy to fix.
Print no emails.
Bring a mug to work and use it instead of styrofoam or paper cups.
Reconnect with nature: start a garden; go for a hike; take the kids out and identify some plants and birds.
Reclaim some of the yard for native plants and grasses.
Encourage others to do the same, and share your own Earth-friendly tips and hacks.

You may be more or less ambitious, but I think this represents something that's feasible for much of the year. It'd be cool to get a read on what the hacker community is doing to make a positive impact on the globe, so make sure to post your own Earth Day hacks and resolutions in the comments.

November 19, 2007

Hamster-powered night light

Here's a little howto on building a low-RPM generator from scratch. I assume that not all of you have extra hamsters lying around to power your night lights, but a similar design could be used for creating a small generator for wind or other energy sources.

Though it's hard for the hamster to make higher voltages with his low-rpm wheel, he has torque to spare. 2 LEDs are barely taxing him......we are drawing only about 30 milliamps into the LEDs at Skippy's top speed. If we add more electrical load to the circuit, he could make more power, with a resulting increase in physical resistance on the wheel---like running uphill. We have yet to try small incandescent flashlight bulbs in the circuit--something that draws more power and makes more physical resistance against the wheel spinning. We did try more LEDs -- he had no trouble lighting up 6 of them. Next we plan to try an array of low-voltage incandescent flashlight bulbs to get optimum power output without tiring Skippy out too much. DanF is guessing that Skippy is good for 200 milliamps without tiring...

One cool thing is that the author uses a bicycle computer to track the hamster wheel's average and top speeds over time. This is a nice tool to have if you're trying to monitor and optimize the environment for your generator setup.

Hamster-Powered Night Light - Link

October 20, 2007

Windbelt: elegant non-turbine wind generator

One of the problems with traditional turbine generators is that they are only really efficient and cost-effective at large scales. They may be great for feeding the grid, but an efficient, cheap, and portable device to power your cell phone or charge a radio a wind turbine will never be. Shawn Frayne's invention, the Windbelt, does not have this problem, and its mechanical simplicity makes you smack your head and wonder why this hadn't been thought of before.

There's no gearbox -- just a thin belt strip stretched taught with a button magnet at one end. When the wind blows, the belt begins to oscillate, moving the magnet in and out of a coil to generate an AC current.

Shawn's Windbelt was one of the award winners in Popular Mechanics' 2007 Breakthrough Awards. They have a video of him discussing his invention and using the prototype and a few dollars worth of electronics to power some LEDs and a clock. He hopes that cheap Windbelt-powered LED lighting will eventually be able to provide an environmentally sound and easily serviceable home-lighting alternative in developing nations. It's such a brilliantly simple design. You can probably build one yourself before the weekend is through.

Windbelt, Cheap Generator Alternative, Set to Power Third World - Link

May 14, 2007

Detecting and reducing power consumption in Linux

For laptop users and data center administrators, power consumption is an important issue. Intel recently released a cool, top-like utility called PowerTOP, which can help you track down processes which are consuming the most power on your machine.

When your CPU isn't executing intructions, it enters an idle mode and consumes far less energy. Any program that keeps the CPU from entering this idle state will cause your machine to consume more power, regardless of how processor intensive the process is. PowerTOP monitors your CPU to determine how many of these "wake up" events occur, and will display the top offenders for you.

Also of note is the new tickless-idle feature in the 2.6.21-rc1 kernel:

The Linux 2.6.21 kernel introduces the so called tickless-idle feature. This feature allows the processor to be really idle for long periods of time, rather than having to wake up every millisecond for the timer tick.

So, if you want to tune your Linux box for ultimate power efficiency, enable the tickless-idle feature in your kernel, grab PowerTOP, and start locating applications or drivers that aren't working as effieciently as they should be.

References:

Linux: Detecting Power Consumption
PowerTOP
Intel's known powersaving issues, tips, and tricks for Linux - this is quite comprehensive

December 23, 2006

Take Your First Step Off the Grid

When I needed portable power for my Small Form Factor WiMax project, I remembered seeing mention of Sundance Solar over at TreeHugger. Their $369 solar kit looked like just what I needed. The kit is pretty simple: a solar cell (24W cell pictured above) and a rechargeable power pack made by Xantrex. You can use the included power adapter to top off the power pack before you go out in the field, and the solar cell will charge up the pack while you work (although the manual says you shouldn't use the power pack while it's charging from the AC adapter, I couldn't find such a warning for solar charging).