Eco Green News, Technology, DIY Project and Hacks

In a joint press conference, GM and Segway officially announced the P.U.M.A (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) at prototype two wheeled urban transport vehicle. With a estimated rage of 35 miles on a single charge and capable of a top speed of 35 miles/hr. The PUMA aims at equipping legions of urbunites a cheep efficient way of commuting in crowded city streets (or golf courses).

The two seat vehicle will feature GM Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) technology, which allows two vehicle to communicate and avoid crashes.

[Engadget]

Chris Fenton is on the beading edge of Eco Tech, with his homebrew DIY laptop built in a wooden case. While his laptop can’t compete with the latest Dells laptops, it is on par with the with computing power of a late 1980’s.

SPECs: a whopping 256 kilobytes total memory, 16k of RAM, Picaxe 28X-1 Microcontroller, 24 x 8 serial character display, in a Beautiful, hand/laser crafted wooden case.

[ChrisFenton]

Chris over at [DIY is the way] built an Arduino powered thermostat they you can monitor your heating and cooling system via a web interface. The project allows him to monitor and control the thermostat remotely. The project uses an Arduino (Duemilanove), an Arduino Ethernet Shield and an LM35 temperature sensor.

The Arduino is a low cost open source microcontroller which has gained a huge following by DIYer and artists.

If you spend a ton of money on solar panels just to have they sit stagnate as the sun tracks trough the sky, you could be losing some cold hard cash.

Instructables has a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solar tracker that takes some easy obtainable parts and combines them to make a very inexpensive solar tracker, which could improve your solar panel efficiency by as much as 30-50%.

DIY Solar Tracker Parts List

• Several treated 2×4’s (Lowes)
• Two wheels from a free bicycle- free or almost free bikes are pretty easy to find from the local landfill or thrift store
• A piece angle iron with pre-punched holes (Lowes)
• A 12 volt linear actuator-(~$75?)- (Ebay)
• An LED tracking sensor- (~$40)( http://www.redrok.com/led3xassm.htm#led3xforsale )
• Various nuts, bolts, screws, cable and wire -(scrounging around my workshop)

Fun and easy little solar project from the makers shed, powered by the sun.

The kit comes with detailed instructions, and is easy enough for even a beginner to assemble. I really like the contoured circuit board, especially the gold flames. It really was amazing how fast this little solar racer ran across the floor after just a minute or two of charging.

Greener Gadgets 2009, a gathering of innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and eco designers hits New York City for its annual design competition.

After the dust cleared and the discussions subsided, it was decided that the twittering Kill-a-watt (Tweet-a-Watt) design my Make Magazine was the winner.

Top 13 projects:

• Wattblocks, submitted by frog Design
• Bware Water Meter, submitted by Ariel Drach
• Fastonauts, submitted by Sara Paculdo
• Indoor Drying Rack, submitted by Rob Podell [3rd Place]
• Tweet-a-Watt, submitted by Limor Fried, Adafruit Industries & Phillip Torrone, MAKE magazine [1st Place]
• Social Environmental Station (Environmental Traffic Light), submitted by Hernando Barragan
• Power-Hog, submitted by Mathieu Zastawny, Mansour Ourasanah, Tom Dooley, Peter Byar, Elysa Soffer, Mathieu Turpault [2nd Place]
• Thermal Torch, submitted by Gunnar Kramp
• Standby Monsters, submitted by Rachel Turner
• RITI Printer, submitted by Jeon Hwan Ju
• Recompute, submitted by Brenden Macaluso
• Blight, submitted by Vincent Gerkens
• Laundry POD, submitted by RKS Design Team [4th Place]

The Evil Techie has put together a quick solar oven project with some low cost everyday products. Using a car solar shade some Velcro patches and stick, he was able to come up with a collapsible portable solar oven concept.

Keep it in your car or take it on a hike, this 20 minute project will surely come in handy on a bright sunny day.

[Evil Techie]