Category Archives: Gadgets and Tech
Surveillance systems now go green with a dash of solar power. Netvision Mobile, a company that’s known for its mobile surveillance systems has built a hybrid solar-battery surveillance trailer known as the Solar 2130 with an 800% increased stand-alone time. Using dual solar panels that produce 250 watts of power and an on-board shock sensor that detects tampering, the Solar 2130 can suspend up to four Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) security cameras 30 feet above the ground with a 360-degree visual range. These cameras can be customized to client specifications.
Continue reading 
Generating green energy, especially when you live in an apartment block can be a lot more difficult. You share the roof space, so you really can’t install a gigantic solar panel up there. A wind turbine outside your window seems like a pretty bad idea too. Here’s a green energy generator that’ll solve most of your energy woes. The Greenerator (we love the name!) collects solar and wind energy and is compact. It can be attached on to an apartment balcony and uses a vertical axis wind turbine and flexible solar panels. Each of these can cut off your electricity bill by a sweet 6%, shortening its length from the floor. A couple of these on your balconies could work wonders!
Continue reading
How long do streetlights last do you know? Not that any of us have bothered to find out but they supposedly need to last for a lot of time and withstand a lot of rough weather. But Panasonic Electric Works Co. in collaboration with Sanyo Electric Co. has come up with a new alternative technique that brings up the lamp life by up to 40%! These streetlights will be made with solar cells, lithium ion batteries and LED lighting, giving the lamps a 10 year lifespan with very little maintenance hassles. The pricing for the 24-watt light is set at around about 3 million yen ($36,940) and a 10-watt version will cost you about 2 million yen ($24,625).
Continue reading
Every body needs a kick to start their day, and most of us opt of a steaming cup of coffee, tea, milk or something. Now no one in their right minds would gulp in the boiling hot drink right away, right? It needs to cool off a bit before you start sipping away, but in the process a lot of heat energy is lost without any real reason. So some bright brains have created a tumbler called the Green Smart Glass. This glass stores up the losing heat into energy form, which can be used later to heat up or cool contained beverages.
Continue reading
Have your appliances been drinking too much of electricity? Have your electricity bills started extending towards the floor? Well, it’s about time you curb your energy usage and hit your self for a bit of eco-consciousness. And to help you with managing your energy usage at home efficiently, Intel has come up with the Intel Home Energy Management Reference Design that includes a lot of tech to keep your energy usage in check. Using a touch-sensitive screen, similar to modern smartphone touchscreens, the system displays various energy management applications to choose from. An ATOM-based device, this one shows up all the important information you require to keep a close eye on your home’s energy usage.
Continue reading
So, you drive a Hummer, all that power and muscle showing, making heads spin around as you drive by. You probably don’t care too much about just how much gasoline you’ve been burning, cruising around. We seriously doubt you’d want one of these too! Well, this sure is for the environment-conscious folk out there, who like giving their gas-guzzling cars a twist. Behold the Puff! Basically a cloud-shaped car accessory that fits on to a car’s exhaust pipe, this one tells you just how polluting your car is using a series of different color lights. Now, a simpler and smaller device would have sufficed. The designers decided to make this one turn your car into a bad animation though. With green lights for less emissions and a flaming red for exhaust puffers, the Puff keeps users informed about their car’s emissions using an iPhone application.
Continue reading
Charging up your electric car at home won’t be so much of a time consuming task now. You probably wouldn’t have to think twice while investing in an electric car now either, with a residential EV charger, like the one GE just unveiled. The GE WattStation, a device we came across some time ago coupled with GE’s Nucleus energy monitoring system, is a residential version of public EV chargers that changes it all, reducing the amount of time required to charge electric cars at home, and juicing them up speedily. Normal home-based EV chargers can take up to 12-18 hours to have that green eco-friendly electric car of yours all juiced up. The GE WattStation takes as less as 4 to 6 hours to do the job, fully charging a 24 kWh battery.
Continue reading
IBM has stepped into the land of solar power and has joined hands with DelSolar Co. Ltd. From Taiwan to develop compound thin-film solar cells. These thin-film cells will help the world generate renewable energy cheaply, pushing away the need for fossil fuels. While IBM Corp showed some pretty awesome results using a copper zinc tin sulfur selenide that improves solar cell efficiency, DelSolar have developed a type of cell with conversion efficiencies up to 18.3 percent for mono-crystalline silicon cells and 16.8 percent for multi-crystalline silicon cells. IBM hopes to decrease the cost of producing solar cells, using cheaper alternatives like zinc and tin.
Continue reading
The sun plays a game of hide and seek at times we least expect. This does create a problem for those who rely on the sun to power up. Here’s a system that can predict the sun’s behavior for the advantage of solar power generation. The system monitors how clouds, cold, heat and airborne dust effects solar power generation. Home-based users of solar power always have the alternative of switching to the grid incase the sun acts moody, whereas larger installations at a utility scale generation does face a drawback. Created by Sandia National Laborites, the system helps prepare for weather changes with all that information.
Continue reading
Solar cells have their setbacks, one of which is being expensive. The more powerful ones always burn a large hole in your pocket, and to generate all that energy, they need to be thicker too. A new type of solar cell has recently been developed by researchers at the Stanford University that might just help save up on costs in the future. The cell is said to be thinner than the wavelength of light itself! And besides just be shockingly skinnier, the cell can also absorb around 10 times more sunlight than the solar cells today. By stopping the light from bouncing around using light trapping, the ultra-thin cell helps absorb more energy easily.
Continue reading