Collaborate Disseminate
Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality goggles made a big splash in the news this week, and try as we might to resist the urge to dunk on them, early adopters …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: February 11, 2024
USB sockets providing 5 VDC are so ubiquitous as a power source that just about any piece of modern portable technology can use them to run or charge. USB power is so common, in fact, that it’s easy to take for granted. But in an emergency or in the wake of a disaster, a working cell phone or GPS can be a life saver and it would be wise not to count on the availability of a clean, reliable USB power supply.
That’s where the Vampire Charger by [Matteo Borri] and [Lisa Rein] comes in. It is a piece of …read more
Continue reading Vampire Charger is a Rugged Anything-to-5VDC Converter
Every scrap of power is precious when it comes to power harvesting, and working with such designs usually means getting cozy with a microcontroller’s low-power tricks and sleep modes. But in the case of the Ultra Low Power Energy Harvester design by [bobricius], the attached microcontroller doesn’t need to worry about managing power at all — as long as it can finish its job fast enough.
The idea is to use solar energy to fill a capacitor, then turn on the microcontroller and let it run normally until the power runs out. As a result, a microcontroller may only have …read more
Continue reading Energy Harvesting Design Doesn’t Need Sleep
The SPINES (Self-Powered IoT Node for Environmental Sensing) Mote is a wireless IoT environmental sensor, but don’t let the neatly packed single PCB fool you into thinking it’s not hackable. [Macro Yau] specifically designed SPINES to be highly modular in order to make designing an energy harvesting sensor node an easier task. The way [Macro] sees it, there are two big hurdles to development: one is the energy harvesting itself, and the other is the software required to manage the use of every precious joule of that harvested energy.
[Macro] designed the single board SPINES Mote in a way that …read more
Continue reading SPINES Design Makes for Modular Energy Harvesting
One of the challenges in this year’s Hackaday Prize is Power Harvesting where we’re asking everybody to create something that harvests energy from something. It could be solar, it could be harvesting energy from a falling weight. If you’d like to give a TED talk, it could be harvesting energy from sound waves. It could be harvesting energy from ambient RF, and where’s the best place to harvest ambient RF? That’s right, next to a microwave.
[Jurist]’s entry for the Power Harvesting Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize is a simple device that mounts to the front door of a …read more
Right now we’re neck deep in the Hackaday Prize. What’s the Hackaday Prize? It’s the Academy Awards of hardware creation, or at least that’s what we’re calling it until we get a cease and desist from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Already we’ve seen over eight hundred entries in the Hackaday Prize, and there are still months to go. We’re already through the Open Hardware Design Challenge, and twenty fantastic projects from that are moving onto the final round. Yesterday, we announced the winners of the Robotics Module challenge, and again we were blown away. These are …read more
Continue reading Friday Hack Chat: All About The Hackaday Prize
It’s a brand new day as the Power Harvesting Challenge begins. This is the newest part of the 2018 Hackaday Prize and we’re looking for 20 entries who will each receive $1,000 and move onto the finals to compete for the top five spots, scoring cash prizes of $50k, $25k, $15k, $10k, and $5k.
Put simply, Power Harvesting is anything you can do that will pull some of the energy you need from a source other than wall-power or traditional battery tech. The most obvious power harvesting technologies are solar and wind. Ditch the battery in your doorbell for a …read more
Continue reading Power Harvesting Challenge: Scavenge Some Power, Win Prizes