For this challenge, we asked you to show off your hacks that power themselves sustainably from the environment around them. After all, nobody likes wires, and changing batteries is just a hassle. What’s better than an autonomous gizmo? Nothing. Because this is Hackaday, we expected to see some finished-looking projects, some absolutely zany concepts, and […]
With all the battery technologies and modern low-current sleep modes in most microcontrollers, running a sensor and microcontroller combo off-grid and far away from any infrastructure is usually not too difficult a task. Often these sorts of systems can go years without maintenance or interaction. But for something that still has to be off-grid but […]
Many of us will have seen the portable solar panels offered on our favourite online purveyors of electronics, but some who have bought them remain unimpressed with their performance. [t.oster92] had just such an issue, and concluded that since it had great dull-day performance, it wasn’t the panels themselves that were at fault. There followed […]
Have you ever looked out across the rooftops of a city and idly gazed at the infrastructure that remains unseen from the street? It seems [varunsontakke80] has, because here’s their project, harvesting energy from the rotation of a rooftop ventilator. The build is a relatively straightforward one, with a pair of disks with magnets attached […]
As we learn more about all the nasty stuff floating in the air, it becomes more compelling to monitor the air for pollution levels. [Aleksei Tertychnyi] does just that with pollutagNode2, a solar-powered pollution sensor. The device uses a Seeed Studio Wia-E5 module for its built-in LoRa low power long-range communication capabilities. Pair that with […]
One of the problems facing any solar power installation comes in storing enough power for high-intensity operations such as cooking. The high-tech and expensive way involves battery banks and inverters, but [Solar Genius] is taking a more direct route by skipping the energy storage entirely. A pair of parabolic antennas are pressed into service as […]
Distraction free writing tools are a reaction to the bells and whistles of the modern desktop computer, allowing the user to simply pick up the device and write. The etyper from [Quackieduckie] is one such example, packing an e-paper screen into a minimalist case. These devices are most often made using a microcontroller such as […]
One of the more interesting categories of our ongoing Green Power Challenge is “anything but PV” — and since the radiated power of Near Field Communication is decidedly not photovoltaic, this hack by [caspar] to control a Pi Pico W from his phone using a tuned antenna absolutely counts. Now, of course you’re not going […]
We’ve all had those times when your electrical device of choice is running low on battery. Sometimes you even plan ahead and are also carrying a battery pack, but what happens when you’ve forgotten to charge the battery pack? This is the problem that [Arnov Sharma] addressed with the SolMate, a portable solar panel that […]
Nobody likes power cords, and batteries always need recharging or replacing. What if your device could run on only the power it could gather together by itself from the world around it? It would be almost like free energy, although without breaking the laws of physics. Hackaday’s 2026 Green-Powered Challenge asks you to show us […]