Category Archives: Gadgets and Tech
Popping out drinks and food isn’t all vending machines do. We’ve come across reverse vending machines like the Envirobank before. Here’s yet another reverse vending machine that sucks in your trash and hands out cash. The Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) gladly accepts your recyclable bottles and cans, for cash in return. These have recently been placed at the Centro Hollywood shopping mall in Adelaide and are part of South Australia’s effort to promote recycling.
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You’ll come across quite a lot of stuff to make your eyebrows disappear into your hairline at the London Festival of Architecture. One of these awesome creations is a eco-friendly elevator, developed by Matthew Lloyd. This innovative contraption uses water and solar power to lift wheelchair users up the stairs of the Duke of York, near the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Weighing three tons, this structure is made of Perspex and steel. To power up, two solar panels atop the contraption juice the sun, while water weights are used to counterbalance the elevator car.
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Home energy management systems are more than just eye-candy for your home that you set up to make your starry eyed neighbor go all green with envy. Speaking about green, these systems sure help keep electricity bills short and brief, and help us stay informed with just how much energy we use, decreasing carbon footprints and strain on electricity grids. Cisco recently came up with an Android tablet this week that works as a table top home energy management system. Using a 7-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive touch screen, this one’s powered by Ubuntu Linux for MID on a 1.1GHz Intel Atom chip. With an 802.11n WiFi or gigabit Ethernet using protocols, you can hook this one up with smart thermostats and appliances.
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We all use elevators, to keep our tired legs from climbing up the stairs today. Well, these elevators do consume a whole load of power and require a few overhauls to make them greener. That’s exactly what Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has been working on and has recently come up with energy-saving parts for elevators. At a factory in Thailand, the company is busy producing energy-efficient hoists, basic elevator parts used to raise and lower elevators suspended by ropes. These new hoists, known as gearless hoists, are a lot more expensive than the older elevator parts, but use 20% lesser power.
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So there goes your “disposable” pen, all useless and worthless, with its ink drain. As usual, you tip it into your waste bin and buy a new one. Well, you probably haven’t realized the amount of energy put into the manufacturing of that writing device, and the tremendous harm a few thousand of these in the waste could do to the environment. A few people do think about matters like these in our day to day life, and some of them come up with alternatives like this biodegradable pen. A US firm, DBA has designed a environment friendly pen, the DBA 98 Pen, that is 98% biodegradable and uses comparatively lesser energy during manufacturing.
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Here’s a solar cell that could easily fit into the mouth of a bug, the thinnest solar cell the world has ever seen before. This extremely thin-film solar cell, by Transform Solar could seen be produced in Boise, if all goes well. Boise, Idaho is already making way for a 10-megawatt photovoltaic plant, and may soon welcome this production plant too. The cells known as “Silver” are thinner than ever, and highly efficient. The company, Transform Solar, is a joint venture between Boise-based Micron Technology and Australia’s Origin Energy. New life will be given to an old computer chip plant which will be overhauled to produce these solar cells.
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Shutterbugs love snapping away at every little unusual and fascinating thing they see. And to keep their photo blogs updated the cameras they use need to remain all juiced up and ready, to fish out quickly and snap away. Well, most of us use a strap to keep that lovely and expensive camera hanging around our necks, just incase we need to click a few moments all of a sudden. After all, photography is about capturing the right frame at the right time. Here’s a strap with a twist to it. It charges up your camera too! Using solar panels embedded in it, the Solar Camera Strap designed by Weng Jie soaks in the sun’s energy outdoors, and keeps you clicking away.
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You’d probably hit yourself on the head, and remember the movie Avatar with this one. Remember the weirdly colored trees in Pandora? Well, London will have a few too, this time in pink instead of the good old greenery. To sprout up at London’s Belgrave Square this weekend, the OR2 is a shading device and solar-powered chandelier. Designed by Orproject, a London based firm, this pink tree generously lends its shade during the day time and glows at night, just like those purple-blue trees in Pandora.
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The world’s finally realizing the use for recycled plastic. With islands of plastic waste sprouting their ugly heads out of our oceans, Electrolux have come up with a great way to put these to use. The company plans to make vacuum cleaners out of all the debris dumped into our oceans, in a project known as Vac from the Sea. One of the world’s largest home appliance makers, Electrolux have come up with an innovative way to get rid of those plastic islands. Using debris harvested from the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic and North Sea, Electrolux will make a limited number of vacuum cleaners using techniques like diving and scooping it up from the waves.
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So you love strumming on your six-stringed electric wonder but seem to be confused of draining the power grid too. Well, here’s a greener alternative to keep those strums alive, an environmentally friendly and effective innovation by Sanyo. You might have come across a previous Sanyo innovation, the Eneloop Music Booster. Sanyo have given musicians around the globe something more to drool upon and hook up to their live on-stage rigs, the Pedal Juice, or the Eneloop KBC-9V3U. A 9V DC Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery, this one’s specially designed for musicians, the budding ones and the professionals alike.
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