Sustainable Energy

Feb 6 - Sustainable Energy and Sensor Networks presentation

Presentation PDF:

Pre-draft of "Indoor solar energy harvesting for sensor network router nodes" (2007):

"Energy Harvesting From Hybrid Indoor Ambient
Light and Thermal Energy Sources for Enhanced
Performance of Wireless Sensor Nodes" (2010):

Feb 12 - Midterm project

I will create a solar powered DIY cooler amp that is beach-ready! Plug in your favourite portable music-playing device and listen to it soaking in some rays.

Links:

March 4 - Midterm project

Success! We had a rooftop BBQ with solar-powered tunes.

The biggest trick to getting this to work was to find good, working batteries. The pelican case 12V battery did not want to be charged by a DC power supply load, nor did one of the 6V batteries I tried. However, when I found two batteries that had been stored properly, it was no issue putting them to use.

More details about the setup and analysis forthcoming.

March 26 - Final project

For my final project, I will be making an mobile WiFi hotspot for my bicycle. Instead of connecting people to the Internet, the mobile WiFi hotspot will run the Occupy.here platform developed by Dan Phiffer [1] to connect people to each other.

There are a few components I will be using for this project:

- I will purchase an appropriate hub dynamo [2] for my bicycle's front wheel that will generate electricity. They are typically rated at 3 W at 6 V.

- I will make a removable enclosure setup for my back bicycle rack. I will fabricate this using materials I find, starting with the Container Store.

- I will purchase a charge controller. I'm not sure yet if I have to splurge on this item or get a cheap solar charge controller. Depends on what the dynamo and battery are rated.

- I will buy a battery appropriate for powering the device and is reasonably good at cycling. I think my routers run off of 12V, so I think I will use a 12V battery.

- I may need to use a DC-DC converter to transform the voltage I get from the battery to a level needed to power the hotspot. The wireless router is a computer, so may need a relatively clean power source.

- And finally, I own many wireless routers and have experience working with them. I will fashion one of mine to work well with this project.

[1] http://occupyhere.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hub_dynamo