Computers and Gadgets

Free Modlet Offer for NYC Residents to Save Air Conditioner Power This Summer

Philip Proefrock

CoolNYC is a cooperative program being offered by Con Edison and ThinkEco which will provide up to 10,000 free thermostats and Modlet plug-in electrical outlet controllers to New York City residents to be used to monitor and control window air conditioning units. The hope is that controlling window AC units can help reduce peak electrical demand this summer.

You may recall the Modlet, which we noted late in 2010 when it was a Top 10 Green Building Product. The Modlet is a smart outlet that plugs in to a conventional outlet and allows you to control and monitor energy usage wirelessly. With the Modlet, appliance use can be scheduled for particular times. There are also apps to allow iPhone and Android devices to control Modlet outlets remotely.

The Modlet networks to a computer via a wireless USB dongle, but it has built in memory so it can run for up to two weeks without connecting to the computer. If there are several Modlets in the home or office, they will conect to each other with a mesh network, so not every one has to be in range of the computer in order to work.

For those outside New York or who don't qualify for this program, the Modlet retails for about $50.

via: Apartment Therapy

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An "Unprinter" to Clean Laser Printed Paper

Philip Proefrock

Scientists at the University of Cambridge (England) have developed a method using lasers to remove the toner from a laser printed page, which would allow the paper to be reused. With the "unprinter," a green laser is flashed at the page. This does not harm the paper, but the light is absorbed by the toner, causing it to detach from the paper.

Because of the difference in technology between laser printing, where the toner sits on top of the paper and is fused to it by heat, and inkjet printing, where some of the dye is absorbed by the paper, it probably would not work (or would work less well) with inkjet printing.

As noted on Slashdot, "Recycling paper is a good step in the right direction, but it still pales in comparison to unprinting. In a worst-case scenario, The University of Cambridge unprinting method has half the carbon emissions of recycling; best-case, unprinting is almost 20 times as efficient."

image: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

via: BoingBoing

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Raspberry Pi is a Low-Power, Credit-Card Sized Computer

Philip Proefrock

A low-cost, low-power, credit-card sized computer developed by a charitable foundation set up by some computer science instructors from Cambridge University. Their goal was to produce a very inexpensive, low-power computer that could be used by kids to learn programming. Now the first examples of the resulting low-cost credit-card sized computer are about to reach the market with a starting price as little as $25.

"The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming."

The Raspberry Pi is an ARM-based, SoC (system on a chip) computer that is just slightly too large to fit in an Altoids tin. It will run several varieties of Linux operating system. Fedora Linux is its recommended distribution, and it will also support Debian and ArchLinux (some issues with Ubuntu and the ARM processor prevent Ubuntu from supporting it at this time).

The Raspberry Pi is capable of delivering BluRay quality display. The developers say that "graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics." It has ports for composite and DVI (using a cheap adapter for the DVI) video output.

Power to run the Raspberry Pi can come from a phone charger or even from 4 AA batteries. A 700 mA USB charger will be the power source for the Model B, and the Model A can get away with even lower power requirements (300 mA). At that low power level, solar powered options should be practical and not terribly expensive.

The Raspberry Pi comes in two models (A and B) with 128 MB and 256 MB of RAM and priced at $25 and $35 respectively. Lots more information and specifications are available in the Raspberry Pi FAQ. The Raspberry Pi will be available beginning at the end of February 2012.

image: via Raspberry Pi

Hat-tip to @chrissalzman for the heads-up

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Sprint Will Require Green Phones

Philip Proefrock

Cell phones are a big source of e-waste, accounting for millions of phones that are discarded annually. Some steps have been taken to try to make some cell phones greener, but it's been small measures so far. However, wireless network provider Sprint is now planning to require all of the cell phones for the network to have green certification.

The standard for mobile phones, developed by UL Environment along with cell phone manufacturers and other industry members, is known as UL ISR 110 (PDF). It is a third-party testing standard that evaluates phones in the categories of Materials Use, Energy Use, Health and Environment, End of Life Management, Packaging, Manufacturing and Operations, and Innovation.

The Samsung Replenish is the first handset to achieve certification under this standard. The Replenish is largely recyclable, as well as having recycled content for many of its components. Sprint hopes to have 70 percent of its handsets meet the certification by the ned of next year.

via: GreenBiz

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Self-Healing Circuits Could Lead to Longer-Lasting Electronics

Megan Treacy

A team of engineers at the University of Illinois have figured out how to create self-healing circuits in electronics and batteries, a discovery that could lead to longer equipment life and make a nice dent in the piles of e-waste plaguing the planet.

As electronics have become more complex, one small circuit failure can render a device useless, especially since it is hard or often impossible to diagnose where that failure occurred to fix it. Nancy Sottos, an engineer working on the project said:

"In general there's not much avenue for manual repair. Sometimes you just can't get to the inside. In a multilayer integrated circuit, there's no opening it up. Normally you just replace the whole chip. It's true for a battery too. You can't pull a battery apart and try to find the source of the failure."

The solution her team came up with was an army of microcapsules about 10 microns in diameter dispersed along a circuit. When a crack occurs in the circuit, the microcapsules break open and release a liquid metal that fills in the crack and restores the electrical flow. The time between a failure and the microcapsules filling the crack is only a few microseconds.

In tests, 90 percent of the samples were healed to 99 percent of their original conductivity. It also require zero human intervention. Only the microcapsules intercepted by a crack opened while the others remained intact.

The engineers see this breakthrough as especially useful for air and spacecraft where miles of conductive wire would have to be gone through to diagnose a failure. The team, which originally used microcapsules to create self-healing polymers, want to see what other applications they may have.

via Physorg

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Free Modlet Offer for NYC Residents to Save Air Conditioner Power This Summer

An "Unprinter" to Clean Laser Printed Paper

Raspberry Pi is a Low-Power, Credit-Card Sized Computer

Sprint Will Require Green Phones

Self-Healing Circuits Could Lead to Longer-Lasting Electronics

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