Hacked Gadgets went to Island Tech 2009 which was on Vancouver Island British Columbia Canada to check on the technology that was being demonstrated. Camosun College had some cool robots on display. Unfortunately the only ones that they had operational were two sumo-bots. The very large GPS robot was there for looks only. That’s too bad since it would have been very interesting to see it in operation. The robot is packed full of electronic from the GPS sensor right down to the processing power of a desktop processor. There were no markings on the motherboard that indicated what processor was on there and the demonstrator did not know but by the looks of it I am thinking it may be a Pentium processor?

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Hacked Gadgets went to Island Tech 2009 which was on Vancouver Island British Columbia Canada to check on the technology that was being demonstrated. Daniel Perera, a graduate student of the Mechanical Engineering Technology program at Camosun College demonstrated a project he and some other students had just completed. It’s a Organic Rankine Cycle which captures thermal energy and converts it into electricity. It captures solar energy in addition to either waste industrial heat or geothermal energy.

The DuPont Suva R123 (PDF link) refrigerant is heated which turns it to gas, the gas is directed into a Tesla Turbine which turns a generator creating electricity. The system is a closed loop which allows the cooled refrigerant to continuously cycle through the system. I wonder if the Hard Drive Platter Tesla Turbine could be adapted to this system!

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This Creating an Effective Platform talk that was recorded at the Gov 2.0 Summit is very interesting. Listen to it to see how some very creative people think. To see all the recorded talks have a look here.

Speakers are, John Markoff from New York Times,  Vint Cerf from Google,  Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Tim Sparapani from Facebook.

This is an interesting project that uses an old CD-ROM drive to make a CD-ROM Door Lock. Granted the system isn’t very secure however it would be trivial to connect it to a real deadbolt. It sounds like the system is voice activated but it is just the inventor asking his son to control the system while it was being recorded.

"The circuit board in the middle is an H-bridge circuit I built to allow the motor to move in both directions. There are two position sensing switches so the Arduino senses when the motor has reached its limit in either direction. A 9V power supply powers the Arduino board, and a separate 5V supply drives the motor through the H-bridge. The dead bolt is literally a bolt — connected to the assembly with a piece of scrap circuit board — that travels through the door jamb and into the door."

Arduino-Controlled Lock from nootropicdesign on Vimeo.

Jerome Demers who is currently an intern at Solarbotics created this Miniball Solar Robot.  Since it doesn’t just drive around it seems to have a mind of its own.

"This robot uses a solar engine circuit. A small solar cell by itself generally doesn’t have the power to make a motor move, so you have to store this power up in a capacitor, which is a small battery-like storage device. When the circuit sees that there is enough power stored, it releases it in a burst to the motor, getting useful work."

The guys over at the Project Lab have made a cool Computer based Etch a Sketch project called Hack a Sketch. Looks like it works just like a real one. This project is basically the reverse of this Etch a Sketch hack that we have seen before.

Thanks for the tip Jack.

"An Arduino board reads the inputs from two potentiometers (the knobs), and sends the information via USB to a Processing sketch which displays the path of the stylus on the screen. This was extremely easy to build because the Arduino is just running the StandardFirmata firmware."

Hack-a-Sketch from nootropicdesign on Vimeo.

To be efficient solar panels should track the sun. This Self Powered Solar Tracking System by ahmadbakri13 of the Palestine Polytechnic University looks to work very well. There is not much details about it though. Hopefully the creator can share a bit more about the inner workings. It is probably similar to other solar tracking systems that we have featured here before though.

"2 DOF solar tracker based on micro controller and small solar cells as sensors, linear actuators and solar system of panel and battery and charge controller where the battery is the source of power of the linear jacks"