Collaborate Disseminate
Schneider Electric’s app-controlled electricity management hardware gives you more control over your power consumption. Are the utilities savings worth it? Continue reading This App From Schneider Electric Can Help Optimize Your Home’s Energy Use—for a Price
High-capacity lithium batteries tend to make everything in life better. No longer must you interact with your fellow human beings if your car battery goes flat in the carpark. You can jump the car yourself, with a compact device that fits in your glovebox. [Big Clive] decided to pull one …read more
Continue reading Lithium Jump Starter Disassembly Is Revealing
Sometimes, you move to a new city, and things just aren’t going your way. You’re out of cash, out of energy, and thanks to your own foolishness, your car’s battery is dead. You need to jump-start the car, but you’re feeling remarkably antisocial, and you don’t know anyone else in town you can call. What do you do?
It’s not a problem, because you’re a hacker and you have a cordless drill in the back seat of your car. The average drill of today tends to run on a nice 18 volt lithium battery pack. These packs are capable of …read more
It’s amazing what creative projects show up if you give one simple constraint. In this case, we asked what cool things can be done if powered by one coin cell battery and we had about one hundred answers come back. Today we’re happy to announce the winners of the Coin Cell Challenge.
A railgun powered by an LIR2032 cell wins the Supernova Award with a cash prize of $500.
This project by [consciousflesh] dumps about 500-750 Joules of energy into a set of electromagnets to launch a graphite projectile. It makes quite a flash …read more
Continue reading Coin Cell Hacks That Won the Coin Cell Challenge
Clearly a believer in the old adage, “Go Big or Go Home”, [Ted Yapo] has decided to do something that seems impossible at first glance: starting his car with a CR2477 battery. He’s done the math and it looks promising, though it’s yet to be seen if the real world will be as accommodating. At the very least, [Ted] found a video by [ElectroBOOM] claiming to have started a car with a super capacitor, so it isn’t completely without precedent.
Doing some research, [Ted] found it takes approximately 2,000 W to 3,000 W at 14 V to start the average …read more
Pity the lowly lead-acid battery. A century of use as the go-to method for storing enough electrons to spin the starter motor of a car engine has endeared it to few. Will newer technology supplant that heavy, toxic, and corrosive black box under your hood? If this supercapacitor boost box is any indication, then we’d say lead-acid’s days are numbered.
To be fair, we’ll bet that number is still pretty big. It takes a lot to displace a tried and true technology, especially for something as optimized as the lead-acid battery. But [lasersaber]’s build shows just how far capacitive storage …read more
Continue reading Hand Cranked Generator Charges Supercaps, Starts Car
