Hi! I’ll be participating in a hackathon next month in the hardware division. I was thinking of making something sollarpunk inspired. I’m posting this to ask for inspiration.
What is some of technology (esp. hardware) that you’d like to see implemented? What is a problem that you’d want solved that could have a potential hardware solution?
I know this is very vague, but I’m curious if anyone has some ideas to share :)
Maybe some cheap remote sensor to check the temperature inside a compost heap?
this could be interesting. unfortunately I am not at all familiar with composting so don’t understand why this would be useful. could you please explain why temperature monitoring is important for composting, or direct me to somewhere I could read more for myself? I want to learn, thanks :)
We have a [email protected] community with some experts. But basically a compost heap is heating up from the microbial activity in it and you want it neither too hot or too cold and thus it is interesting to know if and when to turn it.
I’m not sure where your skillets and specializations lie so I’ll just rattle off some stuff from a solarpunk standpoint
A big piece of solarpunk is in reusing what’s already made, rather than in making new stuff. Maybe an app or ROM that’ll make old cellphones useful for some single-purpose task? Like as a display for linked sensors in agriculture or something? Bonus points for focussing on phones that aren’t supported by lineageOS etc. Full disclosure, I don’t do anything with mobile development so I have no idea how much work I’m putting in front of you with this one.
Edit: this actually wouldn’t be a hardware task
Another aspect is the way it connects nature and technology. I’m not sure if there’s a gap in prosthetics for animals that you could help with?
When I think about solarpunk hardware, I think I’d want any new technology to be simple, robust, and fixable, even if that makes it ugly or bulkier than it could be. The right to repair should be baked in as much as possible. I think where possible, parts like cases should be sustainable (recycled materials) or biodegradable. I have no idea how to emphasize all that in a hackathon but maybe you will?
I’ll add more as I think of them.
Interesting ideas! I’m don’t do mobile dev either, but regarding your first point, I think the idea is very cool, but taking that direction would be very difficult. Achieving what you suggest the easy way is through a mobile app. The problem is that the if we’re looking at older phones that are not supported anymore, they aren’t secure, so we could run into problems there. The second option you suggested, which is a single purpose ROM seems very cool, but it also seems very daunting, as it is hardware specific from my understanding.
I’m not familiar with the animal prosthetic field too much, but could be an idea.
thank you, and please share more ideas if you can :)
I’m not sure where your skillets and specializations lie
I love that autocorrect (I asssume) typo.
Whoops yup
An open source method for making the evacuated tubes used in really powerful solar cookers. I have no idea what kind of arcane technology is used to make those things, but barely anyone sells them and they’re expensive and fragile. I’m kind of picturing that you could assemble one by using a large vacuum chamber that doubles as a glove box? That apparently is a thing that exists, according to wiki.
Haha, this unfortunately falls way out of my area of expertise :)
@may_pretender LoRa/MQTT battery/solar powered air quality sensor? Something that could be deployed en mass to an apartment building roof or across a national park to provide air quality information back to a central location.
I like this a lot! Can you share resources on this topic? I’d like to understand the context / problem a bit better.
Could a multisensor be useful? For example to also measure temperature, wind, light, etc? Aren’t there any such sensors available on the market?
@may_pretender More sensors would certainly be possible, but I’m not sure what timeframe and scope you have available to work with. MQTT is a low-bandwidth messaging service for reporting things like air quality data (not for big things like images or video). LoRa is a wireless networking standard that uses miniscule power to transmit distances of several kilometers. You can wire the lora and air quality sensors to a cheap microcontroller or pi zero w or similar.
I’m not an engineer, so disregard if this is entirely too difficult or hard to explain, but: how about a device to capture energy from longboard wheels? I’m imagining a belt that attaches to the back two wheels to spin a motor. If it’s snug up against the center line, then it wouldn’t offset the board very much.
You could use balsa wood to make a miniature version, to test it out. It’s…barely solarpunk, in that the energy used to power the longboard comes from calories.
… isn’t this just an electric longboard? They have regen braking already most of the time
Probably? I was under the impression that those are battery powered, so you can use them to get up to speed. What I was imagining was just taking energy from it.
Yes they have batteries, but you would need one to store the energy produced from the motor/generator. Either with a built-in battery, at which point its just an electric longboard, or by connecting it directly to your phone or something?
Or perhaps the idea could be scaled down and take inspiration from Dutch bikes by using a small dynamo to power a headlight and taillight or something like that not normally found on a basic longboard without the need for the added batteries or weight.
I like the idea of powering lights! Perhaps a strip all along the rim of the board that can change to red upon braking?
this sounds cool, and not too complicated to implement :)
To give some ideas as well, maybe there could be some addons powered from the electric longboard, but I can’t really see how they could be useful. The main problem I see is that you’d need a wire coming from the longboard to the user / addon. this seems dangerous.
Maybe you can have the longboard battery be detachable, or have a smaller detachable batterry different from the main one that you could use for other tasks? (both being chardged either externally or through regenerative braking)
But tbh, I think such a project would overcomplicate and miss the point of the longboard.
@[email protected] 4 weeks
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Plug a GPS unit into a solar panel. Done.
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