Double-Checking NASA’s Eclipse Estimate At Home

If you were lucky enough to be near the path of totality, and didn’t have your view obscured by clouds, yesterday’s eclipse provided some very memorable views. But you know what’s…

Space Mirrors: Dreams Of Turning The Night Into Day Around The Clock

Recently, a company by former SpaceX employee Ben Nowack – called Reflect Orbital – announced that it is now ready to put gigantic mirrors in space to reflect sunshine at ground-based s…

Lamp Becomes Rotating, Illuminated Sign For Festival Table

Two things we love are economical solutions to problems, and clever ways to use things for other than their intended purpose. [CelGenStudios] hits both bases with a simple illuminated and spinning …

PhotonPower Zero For Effortless Solar Pi Zero Projects

A Pi Zero doesn’t need much to sustain itself, and it’s projects like the PhotonPower Zero that remind us of it its low appetite when we need this reminder most. The PhotonPower Zero bo…

More Progress On Perovskite Solar Cells

Perovskites hold enormous promise for generating solar energy, with the potential to provide lighter and cheaper cells than those made from silicon. Unfortunately, the material breaks down too rapi…

Garden Light Turned Mesh Network Node

We love a good deal, especially when it comes to scavenging parts for projects. Cheap outdoor solar lights are more than just garden accessories; they’re a handy source of waterproof enclosur…

Sun On The Run: Diving Into Solar With A Mobile PV System

For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of interest in small-scale residential solar power systems lately. Even in my neck of the woods, where the sun doesn’t shine much from October to Apr…

Desalinating Water With The Sun

Getting fresh water from salt water can be difficult to do at any kind of scale. Researchers have developed a new method of desalinating water that significantly reduces its cost. [via Electrek] By…

Robot Sunflower Follows The Sun

Real flowers do it, and even the Beatles did it. [Robo Hub] now has a plastic sunflower that tracks the sun using, of course, an Arduino. It may not qualify as a real robot, but it does mimic a rea…

Wireless Data Connections Through Light

When wired networking or data connections can’t be made, for reasons of distance or practicality, various wireless protocols are available to us. Wi-Fi is among the most common, at least as f…

The Mysterious Case Of The Disappearing Inventor

When combing through the history of technological innovation, we often find that pinning down a given inventor of something can be tricky. [Foeke Postma] at Bellingcat shows us that even the Smiths…

2023 Hackaday Prize: A Reinvented Solar Tracker

It probably goes without saying that solar panels need to be pointed at the sun for optimal performance. The tricky bit is that the sun has a funny habit of moving on you. For those with a solar pa…

Hackaday Prize 2023: Supercapacitors Let Solar Speaker Work In Darkness

Solar panels are a great way to generate clean electricity, but require some energy storage mechanism if you also want to use their power at night. This can be a bit tricky for large solar farms th…

Gardening Robot Uses Sunlight To Incinerate Weeds

Removing weeds is a chore few gardeners enjoy, as it typically involves long sessions of kneeling in the dirt and digging around for anything you don’t remember planting. Herbicides also work…

Converting On-Grid Electronics To Off-Grid

Husband and wife team [Jason & Kara] hail from Canada, and in 2018, after building their own camper, sold up their remaining earthly goods and headed south. If you’re not aware of them, t…

Solar Protocol Envisions A Solar-Powered Web

The transition to low carbon energy is an important part of mitigating climate change, and the faster we can manage, the better. One project looking at how we could reduce the energy requirements o…

New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids

It’s been clear for a long time that the world has to move away from fossil energy sources. Decades ago, this seemed impractical, when renewable energy was hugely expensive, and we were yet t…

Reclaiming A Pi-Based Solar Datalogger

There’s quite a few devices on the market that contain a Raspberry Pi as their core, and after becoming a proud owner of a solar roof, [Paolo Bonzini] has found himself with an Entrade ENR-DT…

Solar Cell Fabric Makes Anything Solar

MIT has been working on very thin solar cells made of a film just a few microns thick. The problem? The cells are so thin that they’re hard to work with. You could make a small solar cell on …

Smelting Solar Style

If you attended the 2022 Supercon, you might have heard the story about the SMD soldering challenge table nearly catching on fire. A magnifying lamp caught the sun just right and burned a neat tren…