Category: DIY

Micro Wind Turbines

Mini wind turbinesIn urban settings many times it just isn’t practical to install wind turbines in order to harness the energy of the wind. The buildings may not be able to support a large generator or it might be that there just isn’t enough wind. Strange as that sounds, wind turbines won’t work if the wind is too slow. The blades won’t turn. Simple as that. They need at least 20mph winds to be any good. What is an eco conscious urban dweller to do?
The Motorwind might be an answer to some of your power needs. It’s a bank of turbine blades (apx 10" in dia) that are geared together that will generate power in winds of only 7mph (4m/s). That’s a light breeze, just a 3 on the Beaufort scale, and is pretty common. You should be able to get that from just the convection currents coming off from all the cement in the car park next to your office. With one of these Motorwind turbine setups you can charge batteries and power devices directly or with an AC inverter. All in all a good way to get some work out of a nice spring breeze.

The picture below is of the first micro-turbine array set up in Hong Kong. It includes 40 turbines, which has daily production capacity of 960W/h with average wind speeds of 5.5 m/s. This installation was made in November, 2006, and is large enough to power all of the lights in the apartment below.

[via neat-o-rama]
MotorWave

DIY Your Own Pinhole Blender

DIY Pinhole blender how-to (step 6) by bricolage.108This is a great tutorial on how you can build your own multi shutter pinhole camera using old film canisters and a metal can. Very inventive I must say. The images taken with this sort of camera blends together different scenes in a very organic (see examples) way that many people can only achieve these days using a graphics program like Photoshop. Does anyone still remember the bad old days when trial and error was the only way to do such photographic manipulation?

Bricolage: weblog errante… Arquivo: Março de 2007

If you want to buy one, check out the ‘original’ pinhole blender at pinholeblender.com

Alice: Free, Easy, Interactive 3D Graphics for Kids

AliceI was reading my eWeek today and say this cool article talking about a way to teach programming to kids. The idea is that you have this rich visual 3D world that you program the objects in it to move and interact. I took a look at it and discovered just that, it talks about methods, objects, and other tenants of modern programming . Man, I wished I would have had this when I was a kid. It would have made learning BASIC a lot simpler.
Once the students get comfortable with the interface they will be producing animated movies in no time at all. They can draw from a library rich in 3D models like dragons, faeries, spaceships, buildings. There is also a way to import models from 3D Studio Max using a third party utility. There is also a collaboration with the popular game ‘The Sims‘  to add a much more fluid look and feel to the character animations. I hope that when this happens Alice will stay free to anyone that wants to download it. My kids are both fans of the Sims and I know that this would at least give them a clue as to what computer programming is like. Even if you don’t have kids but would like to know more of how all this software stuff works you should download it and give it a try. It’s written in Java so it will work on both PC and Mac.

Alice: Free, Easy, Interactive 3D Graphics for the WWW

Solar Hot Air Balloons, Not Just For Kids Anymore

Everyone knows about hot air balloons. A great big sack filled with hot air that floats as if by magic in the sky. Ok, not by magic, they float because the hot air takes up less space than cold air so it weighs less and thus floats. I’m sure most people think that the air needs to be heated by great honking propane torches to obtain positive buoyancy but that just isn’t the case. With a thin enough envelope (ballooning lingo for the thing that holds the hot air) you can use the mighty power of the sun to do this job on the cheap and clean. This site is loaded with useful info (some may be in French however) and data for your own personal exploration of the atmosphere. Did I say personal? Yep, you bet. Some people have actualy build solar balloons large enough to lift a person. There are even instructions on how you can build and use a 1.9 meter diameter mini solar balloon. I’m surprised that this hasn’t graced the pages of MAKE magazine yet.

[via Photoplane]
Solar hot air balloon

DCA (Sodium Dichloroacetate) Cancer Treatment for Pets

Special agent Greg on detachment in the Interzone had this to say recently:

It has begun: this link is to a site that is ostensibly to sell Sodium Dichloroacetate for experimental use in pets with terminal cancer. This compound has received much press recently due to some encouraging preliminary lab test results. Obviously, desperate people are going to be purchasing and using this compound long before clinical trials even begin.
It may very well interfere with conventional treatments, be harmful in itself, or be ineffective. DCA is known to cause peripheral neuropathy (tingling and numbness of the extremities) with chronic use.
On the other hand, if it proves to be the miracle cure that some are hyping, we will begin hearing reports in the next couple months of people with untreatable conditions making miraculous recoveries.

I think he is absolutely right. Expect to see more and more people rolling their own treatments with DCA in the near future. For better or for worse.

Buy DCA – DCA Sodium Dichloroacetate Cancer Treatment for Pets

An AVR-based Analog Plotbot with an E-Paper Display

This is just perfect! Using a Magna Doodle as an output device for a computer is just brilliant.

What do you get when you mix a 1970’s style analog chart recorder, an 8-bit microcontroller, and a Fisher-Price Doodle Pro? A truly 21st century toy: An analog PlotBot with e-paper display technology!
Our machine is based around a vintage analog X-Y data recorder. Its original purpose in life was to perform basic laboratory data collection, plotting two voltages against each other, and was one of the primary tools for that purpose right up until computers took over that job in the 1980’s. Because they were once so common and are now generally obsolete, it’s quite easy to get one of your own. There are usually several under $50 on eBay at any given time, and that’s where we got ours. …
The other major modification that we’ve made is that we’ve replaced the pen and paper with what seems like out of reach technology: an inexpensive and readily available e-paper display: the panel from a Doodle Pro. …
The Doodle Pro is a descendent of the Magna Doodle, a classic children’s toy dating to 1974. (I’m not sure what makes this a “Pro” anything, however.) It uses a simple magnetophoretic display, where ferromagnetic particles are suspended with near-neutral buoyancy in an opaque, viscous white liquid. Using a magnetic stylus, you can attract the black particles to the top surface, or with a magnetic “eraser” on the bottom side, pull the particles away, leaving only the white liquid visible.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – An AVR-based Analog Plotbot with an E-Paper Display