Hacked Gadgets went to Island Tech 2009 which was on Vancouver Island British Columbia Canada to check on the technology that was being demonstrated. Camosun College had some cool robots on display. Unfortunately the only ones that they had operational were two sumo-bots. The very large GPS robot was there for looks only. That’s too bad since it would have been very interesting to see it in operation. The
Hacked Gadgets went to Island Tech 2009 which was on Vancouver Island British Columbia Canada to check on the technology that was being demonstrated. Daniel Perera, a graduate student of the Mechanical Engineering Technology program at Camosun College demonstrated a project he and some other students had just completed. It’s a Organic Rankine Cycle which captures thermal energy and converts it into electricity. It captures solar energy in addition to
This Creating an Effective Platform talk that was recorded at the Gov 2.0 Summit is very interesting. Listen to it to see how some very creative people think. To see all the recorded talks have a look here. Speakers are, John Markoff from New York Times, Vint Cerf from Google, Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Tim Sparapani from Facebook.
This is an interesting project that uses an old CD-ROM drive to make a CD-ROM Door Lock. Granted the system isn’t very secure however it would be trivial to connect it to a real deadbolt. It sounds like the system is voice activated but it is just the inventor asking his son to control the system while it was being recorded. "The circuit board in the middle is an
Jerome Demers who is currently an intern at Solarbotics created this Miniball Solar Robot. Since it doesn’t just drive around it seems to have a mind of its own. "This robot uses a solar engine circuit. A small solar cell by itself generally doesn’t have the power to make a motor move, so you have to store this power up in a capacitor, which is a small battery-like storage
The guys over at the Project Lab have made a cool Computer based Etch a Sketch project called Hack a Sketch. Looks like it works just like a real one. This project is basically the reverse of this Etch a Sketch hack that we have seen before. Thanks for the tip Jack. "An Arduino board reads the inputs from two potentiometers (the knobs), and sends the information via USB
To be efficient solar panels should track the sun. This Self Powered Solar Tracking System by ahmadbakri13 of the Palestine Polytechnic University looks to work very well. There is not much details about it though. Hopefully the creator can share a bit more about the inner workings. It is probably similar to other solar tracking systems that we have featured here before though. "2 DOF solar tracker based on
