World’s largest sand battery set to slash emissions in Finnish town

The battery will be able to store a week’s heat demand in winter - how does it work?

Thermal Earring Tracks Body Temperature

If you want to constantly measure body temperature to track things like ovulation, you usually have to wear something around your wrist or finger in the form of a smartwatch or ring. Well, what if …

A Transistor, But For Heat Instead Of Electrons

Researchers at UCLA recently developed what they are calling a thermal transistor: a solid-state device able to control the flow of heat with an electric field. This opens the door to controlling t…

First commercial-scale ocean thermal energy generator slated for 2025

In an average day, tropical oceans absorb about 278 petawatt-hours of solar energy. Harvesting just 1/4000th of that energy would supply the entire world's daily electricity – and ocean thermal energy conversion provides a possible method.

Thermochromic Treatment Keeps Solderless Breadboards Smokeless

There’s a point in a component’s thermal regime that’s between normal operation and overloaded to the point of obvious failure. That’s a dangerous region, because the compon…

IR Camera Is Excellent Hacking Platform

While there have been hiccups here and there, the general trend of electronics is to decrease in cost or increase in performance. This can be seen in fairly obvious ways like more powerful and affo…

Thermal Camera Plus Machine Learning Reads Passwords Off Keyboard Keys

An age-old vulnerability of physical keypads is visibly worn keys. For example, a number pad with digits clearly worn from repeated use provides an attacker with a clear starting point. The same co…

Pocket-Sized Thermal Imager

Just as the gold standard for multimeters and other instrumentation likely comes in a yellow package of some sort, there is a similar household name for thermal imaging. But, if they’re known…

A Single-Resistor Radio Transmitter, Thanks To The Power Of Noise

One of the great things about the Hackaday community is how quickly you find out what you don’t know. That’s not a bad thing, of course; after all, everyone is here to get smarter, righ…

A Tiny Forest Of Resistors Makes For Quick And Dirty Adaptive Optics

The term “adaptive optics” sounds like something that should be really complicated and really expensive. And in general, the ability to control the properties of optical elements is suf…

Restoring $5 Busted Synthesizer Made Easy, Thanks To Thermal

[D. Scott Williamson] paid $5 for a Roland JV-30 synthesizer at a garage sale. Score! There was only one catch: it didn’t work and didn’t include the power supply. Luckily, restoring it…

Desktop Performance In A Custom Mac Laptop

Most of us either own or have used a laptop at some point. For traveling, as a student, or even for browsing Hackaday on the couch in front of the TV, they are pretty much indispensable. They do te…

Laptop Gets Fixed By Simply Removing Problem Component

We wouldn’t go so far as to say “don’t try this at home”, but the way [Troy] brought an expensive (but out of warranty) laptop back to life is interesting, even if it should…

Hands-On Review: TCam-Mini WiFi Thermal Imager

A thermal camera is a tool I have been wanting to add to my workbench for quite a while, so when I learned about the tCam-Mini, a wireless thermal camera by Dan Julio, I placed an order. A thermal …

A bitcoin business is polluting Seneca Lake, say critics. Here's how.

"The lake is so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," said a woman who lives near a gas-fired New York plant that powers 8,000 computers mining bitcoins.

Hacking A Thermal Imager For Dual-use Of The Thermal Sensor

Sometimes a device doesn’t do quite what one needs, and in those cases a bit of tampering might do the trick. That’s what led to being able to record video from a HTI HT-A1 thermal imag…

Thin Coatings Require An Impressive Collection Of Equipment And Know-How

Let’s be honest — not too many of us have a need to deposit nanometer-thick films onto substrates in a controlled manner. But if you do find yourself in such a situation, you could do w…