Keeping a cool head is difficult at the best of times, least of all when it’s summer and merely thinking of touching bare skin to the pavement already gets you a second-degree burn. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to spend all summer in an air-conditioned room, but what if you took said room with you? Introducing […]
Most solar lights are cheap garbage that exist just to put more microplastics into the environment as they degrade in short order. [Jeremy Cook] built his own solar light, however, and this one might just last a little longer. Most solar lights rely on the cheapest nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride cells that are available on […]
The folks at Low Tech Magazine are here again, this time with a solar powered coffee maker. Lest you think of a large parabolic mirror with a pot at its focus, in this case the device is much more friendly. It’s a table-top appliance that relies upon a 100 W 12 V panel for its […]
Friends, I’ve gotten myself into a pickle and I need some help. A few years back, I decided to get into solar power by building a complete PV system inside a mobile trailer. The rationale for this doesn’t matter for the current discussion, but for the curious, I wrote an article outlining the whole design […]
One of the biggest downsides of installing solar panels on a rooftop is that maintenance of the actual roof structure becomes much more difficult with solar panels in the way. But for many people who don’t have huge tracts of land, a roof is wasted space where something useful could otherwise go. [Mihai] had the […]
Data centers and the electrification of devices that previously ran on fossil fuels is driving increased demand for electricity around the world. China is addressing this with a megaproject that is a new spin on their most famous piece of infrastructure. At 250 miles long with a generating capacity of 100 GW, the Great Solar […]
For as versatile and inexpensive as switch-mode power supplies are at all kinds of different tasks, they’re not always the ideal choice for every DC-DC circuit. Although they can do almost any job in this arena, they tend to have high parts counts, higher complexity, and higher cost than some alternatives. [Jasper] set out to […]
It’s sometimes easy to forget that the light in the sky is an actual star. With how reliable it is and how busy we tend to be as humans, we can take that incredible fact and stow it away and largely go on with our lives unaffected. But our star is the thing that gives […]
Although there are some ferries and commercial boats that use a multi-hull design, the most recognizable catamarans by far are those used for sailing. They have a number of advantages over monohull boats including higher stability, shallower draft, more deck space, and often less drag. Of course, these advantages aren’t exclusive to sailboats, and plenty […]
By now, you’ve probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be […]