Joe Carruth has harnessed the power of the sun by creating a huge Solar Mirror Array in Colorado. This array boils 12 gallons of water to generate steam and the steam powers a twin piston steam engine. The steam engine is attached to a 12KW Generator with a straight shaft. Considering that this solar array could fit in my back yard the amount of energy it produces is very impressive.

The system is shown powering a large saw but it didn’t seem to operate at full capacity so based on that I am not sure how much energy is actually being generated but regardless, it is significant. Now there needs to be a form of energy storage other than expensive batteries to make this system ideal. How about using the system to pump water into a large raised area, then when electricity is needed you could drive a wheel?

If you don’t want one of these solar collectors in your backyard you can centralize the dishes as the video below demonstrates.

Via: Green Power Science

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The team over at Gadget Gangster have been real busy. The Super GrooveAxe a new product that is now available on their site.

“Percussion in your pocket. Feel the tiny boom! With your Super GrooveAxe, the beats will always be with you, so you’ll never feel lonely again. The Super GrooveAxe is a simple to build project that uses a Picaxe microcontroller to make looping drum patterns. It includes a 3.5mm jack to output audio to headphones, a stereo, or directly power small speakers.”

Thanks to Dean for sending in a tip about this cool Holocube – 3D Projection Platform. Is this the monitor of the future? Do you have a tip about something cool, be sure to let us know!

“Holocube is a fully integrated 3D projection platform. It combines the most
advanced modern projection techniques in a contemporary sleek housing. This
enables product focused as well as contextual 3D projections.”

If you were a electronic hobbyist 55 years ago this is the type of projects you would be building. The visual point to point diagram is great, it reminds me of an old version of Fritzing. If the circuit wasn’t enough, the English grammar is also interesting, on the first page AM is spelled ayem. The woman in the front page picture look happy even though there is only one chair to go around. I have never seen a capacitor with a uufd designation before, I thought it was a typo at first but it is used many times. There is also no shortage of squiggles in their resistor designations. Interesting how some things have changed slightly and how other items have stood the test of time.

Anna Ceguerra saw the prize for the contest this week and sent in some of the work she has been doing with the 4D Systems components.

“This demo shows how to communicate between a uOLED display and the uCAM. The 4DGL code attached includes the following functionality:

1. A text-based menu system on the uOLED, displaying the various initialisation parameters for the uCAM
2. The uOLED initalising communication with the uCAM
3. The uOLED blitting the received picture information from the uCAM directly onto the screen”

Mikey Sklar has put together an interesting wallet, it is made out of hard drive platters. As you know we have a soft spot for anything made from Hard Drives here at Hacked Gadgets.

“I took apart a dead hard drive that I had dumpster dived last year initially for the magnets, but I could not take my eyes off of the platters. The magnet would just be trouble with my ATM card magnetic strips as well as sticking to everything else around. Using a rivet gun I was able to quickly adhere two car keys and my AAA card to the platters.”

Here is a good video about communicating amongst multiple microcontrollers. In this case they are NerdKits that are distributing sign data so that a huge Multi-Panel LED Array can be built. Even if you aren’t interested in the project have a look at it for the SPI info.

“In this project, we put a new twist on our old idea, and modified the LED Array into a giant multi panel array — theoretically capable of driving 1200 LEDs (or more if you are creative!). The project uses the SPI bus to communicate between different chips, so in addition to the awesome new LED sign, we also go over how to use another useful piece of the ATmega168 microcontroller.”