Notes from Knut

Are flexible solar panels finally catching up?

2013-01-02T21:09:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I documented a DIY project where I created self charging batteries using flexible solar panels. However, the batteries where just an experiment in evidencing; the art of make believe in realising new product concepts and evaluate said concept concept before any actual work is done. This experiment was part of my master thesis on how consumers could be encouraged to produce electricity in their own homes.

One of the key components missing at the time to make those batteries more than a mirage, where the lack of proper flexible solar panels. For some time there has been "bendable" panels available, but those where still attached to quite thick substrate.

Actual cells in use. Not too curvy, these are!

Now I find that researchers at +Stanford Engineering has developed a method to peel off the thin film Photo Voltaic (PV) cells from its substrate and transfer them onto various objects, even those with curved surfaces. Their method includes soaking the panels in hot water to loosen the cells from the original substrate which sounds suitable for any DIY project.

The substrate is normally made of glass, not flexible, in solar panels. Substrate can also be made of special polymers (plastics) for thin film solar panels that are more or less flexible. The major new development, as far as I understand, is that the substrate is no longer necessary for the cells to function and thus can be removed. These new PV cells can be applied to non special materials and could give product designers new freedoms in adding powers sources to their products without compromising in their designs.

Maybe this technology could be used to produce tear off pages in a booklet for DIYers to stick on any odd project laying around? Sign me up for a couple!

Happy New Year!

Nokia firmly leads the pack by Bluetooth numbers

2011-01-13T14:00:00.001+01:00

This table shows the top 20 manufactures of 5153 unique bluetooth devices spotted in Oslo, Norway between 11. November 2010 and 12. January 2011.

Device manufacturer	Count
Nokia Danmark	1811
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications	888
Nokia Corporation	638
Apple	282
Samsung Electronics Co	241
Samsung Electronics	160
Texas Instruments	114
Hon Hai Precision Ind Co	82
Infineon	80
Private	78
Lg Electronics	75
Tomtom	67
Novero	65
Usi	61
Parrot Sa	39
Continental Automotive Systems	35
Motorola	29
Liteon Technology Corporation	25
Apple Computer	19
Alps Electric Co	18

I am grabbing the information from nearby devices on my daily commute to work, which results in an average of 150 unique devices. The data was gathered infrequently, mostly on weekdays.

PS. I'll get back to you shortly (this year) with a more interesting "tool" related to bluetooth!

Synthetic Vortex in Blender 2.5

2010-07-09T12:18:00.004+02:00

I'm starting to use Blender 2.5 as my new tool these days. It offers some really nice smoke, cloud & fluid simulations that might get handy in my new job as a "Weather designer".

The goal is to use Blenders particles and simulation tools to create weather phenomenon that I can use in my work.

My familiar strangers this morning

2010-02-25T10:18:00.007+01:00

I have been experimenting with data logging on Pachube and the concept of the "familiar stranger" (people you coincidentally create social networks with due to same habits or routines). I believe there is a big potential for interesting analytical use of the data.

This morning I logged my surroundings going from home to work. The thumbnails show two graphs, one for new strangers (top) and one for familiar strangers (bottom). In this case "familiar" is concidered to be people that have been around for more than one minute.

Overlaying the two graphs I'll try to explain what caused the fluctuations in the data.

Vertical lines are five minutes apart, blue is for strangers and red is for familiar strangers.

Leaving kindergarden and walking towards subway stop. I was alone.
Approaching the station, buying a coffee at the subway station and a seven minute wait at station. People come and go and on the platform, but there are a few people waiting with me.
Entering rail car, lots of people around. I guess the second blue spike is the next station.
The rail car fills up and the same people are with me until I approach my transfer station (15 min journey). See how the two blue spikes adds up to the height of the red graph, suggesting that the people from the two first spikes are within 5-10 meters.
Chaning line, meet new people, but the rail car is less crowded than on the other line.
Leaving the subway and passing through an large office builidng.
At work, quite a few familiar strangers that i suspect will stay for the duration of the day.

I find it interesting to see how the blue spikes on some occations are followed by a longer red surge and sometimes not. This tells me, just from the data that some occations you move past people and sometimes you stay with them. Which is what you would expect!

Pachube and mobile.processing

2010-02-22T15:05:00.001+01:00

I wanted to use my mobile phone (SE C702) as a reality mining platform. Primarily I want to do something with Bluetooth Device data and Geolocation. As my main affiliation with code so far has been through the various processing.org environments I wanted to use mobile.processing.org to gather and share data through my phone.

To make a long story short: I posted the code needed to upload data formatted as EEML to Pachube from a mobile.processing sketch in their soon vacant forum...

About
Pachube is a site that promise to enable "The Internet of things". You are encouraged to Store Share & Discover realtime data from a variety of sources.

Mobile Processing is a branch of processing.org that creates Midlets of your sketches. As J2ME seems to be left behind due to more popular environments like iPhone, Android and soon to be Windows 7 Mobile the development of Mobile Processing is halted, but still functional.

Connection Proxy on Windows 7 x64

2010-02-18T14:20:00.008+01:00

This is how I got the Connection Proxy from the Sony Ericsson Java ME SDK to work on Windows 7 64-bit version:

Install your phones PC Suite to get all phone networking drivers
Get & Install 32-bit JDK
Get & Install semc_java_me_cldc_sdk.2-5-0-5.exe (Place it in default location C:\)
Get the eclipse SDK for win 64 as we need one file from this zip.
Get RXTX library as we need additional files from this zip.
Find "org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_64_3.5.1.v3555a.jar" in eclipse SDK & place it in the folder "C:\SonyEricsson\JavaME_SDK_CLDC\OnDeviceDebug\lib\devexp\plugins"
Edit "connectionproxy.cmd" so that "org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.4.0.v3448f.jar" becomes "org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_64_3.5.1.v3555a.jar".
Find "RXTXcomm.jar" in the rxtx package & place it in the "C:\SonyEricsson\JavaME_SDK_CLDC\OnDeviceDebug\bin" folder
Place "rxtxSerial.dll" in the "C:\SonyEricsson\JavaME_SDK_CLDC\OnDeviceDebug\lib" folder
Edit "javax.comm.properties" and write "#" before "Driver=com.sun.comm.Win32Driver" and add "Driver = rxtxSerial.dll" on the next line.
Follow the instructions from #4 given by Vlad from the developer.sonyericsson.com community to start everything

This was a game of hide and seek that fixed "On Device Debugging" on my c702 phone using Netbeans 6.8 IDE.

Cheers!

PS. Remember to not use the Start menu shortcuts as they do not work very well for the connectionproxy. Use the connectioproxy.cmd in "C:\SonyEricsson\JavaME_SDK_CLDC\OnDeviceDebug\bin".

Jäppling IKEA PV Solar flashlight

2009-04-25T12:19:00.002+02:00

Standing
Originally uploaded by etunKo

I just bought this solar charged (7 hrs charge = 5,5 hrs use) flashlight from IKEA. The first impression is an rather inelegant flashlight, but it is intended to stand on its metal support. The main body feels very rugged and is quite heavy. No squeaking parts. The metal support however snaps off its pivot hinges without any help. The on/off button have a surprisingly good feel to it. It is now standing in my window, side by side with the Sun Jar (Picture coming up). See all pictures tagged Jäppling

Moving day

2009-04-23T22:52:00.006+02:00

Some changes from today. I'll now maintain two blogs for the Diploma. The first: diplom.bareknut.no will be the behind the scenes documentation of my master thesis and the other one (unnamed until further notice) that will contain the evidencing and suggested near future of smart grid city.

i'll be back.

/update:

The correct links are: behind.untappedenergy.org for documentation and
untappedenergy.org.

"Mid term" presentation

2009-04-21T03:05:00.000+02:00

Untapped Energy

View more presentations from Knute.

Braun water boiler on solar energy

2009-04-21T00:41:00.008+02:00

I'm really satisfied with the new home grid system i've had installed. Now with the new Smart Appliance base from Braun i can choose any parameter to indicate a time when it is permitted to boil water. At this time i've linked the total energy output of my PV cell to the kettle. The base lights up when enough energy is produced. It takes roughly four hours on overcast days. My tea is now green!

This must be developed from Lennart Fahléns work.

/something in the video is broke, i'll get back to that
/video fixed

Testing the new Energy Dashboard

2009-04-17T16:08:00.003+02:00

First glimpse of the newly installed energy dashboard. I'll be back with a sharper version soon.

Interfacing my home grid

2009-04-14T14:01:00.006+02:00

Tinkering a bit more with my home grid I wrote about yesterday I found the mobile interface to the new PV node valuable. By either navigating to the device or just touching the socket in which it is plugged, my NFC phone opens the device GUI. It gives the current panel output as Watts in real time. I immediately found it necessary to adjust the angle of my panel to see if it captured any more energy, but it was obviously too cloudy to make any difference. I am, however, pleased to see that the panel is infact producing quite a bit, even when it is overcast. I'll be checking the prognosis more frequently with this tool in my hands.

First solar cells installed to my home grid

2009-04-13T18:38:00.004+02:00

I had the opportunity to install a solar panel at home this easter. The usual downside of doing that is that you need a battery or a big and costly inverter to send it to the grid. Fortunately I got enrolled in a small scale smart grid roll out with my local utility. This enables me to add any generator such as a PV panel, a wind trubine, a fuel cell, or a dynamo, directly to my electrical sockets at home. If I generate electricity the utility give credits per Wh generated that I can accumulate to consume in other devices. I haven't tested it all yet, but it feels really good already.

DIY electricity fail

2009-04-13T12:26:00.001+02:00

I'm not so sure the best man was hired to make this connection, he seems to have been just a bit short on grout to cover it up properly.

Mandatory workshop picture

2009-04-06T21:29:00.001+02:00

Random words on paper in a mess on a table. Other than that it was a nice talk with Gunnar og Marianne. Thanks!

Wired: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

2009-04-04T15:59:00.003+02:00

Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

An easy to read article that gives a good overview over current situation, in the US atleast, and pointer to the road ahead.

... regulators in dozens of states began to implement decoupling, a policy that rewards utilities for coming in below generation targets. Suddenly, companies could profit by promoting efficiency.

This quote from the article suggests the benefits of changing the behaviour of power generators from max production to max efficiency. Schemes like that would have a great impact if realised all over the world.

elec-tricity

2009-03-31T12:15:00.006+02:00

I want more of this. Please?

I do not want to be electrocuted..

2009-03-27T16:15:00.004+01:00

Fra Notes from Knut

Energy Dashboards in the Wild

2009-03-04T11:14:00.017+01:00

Energy Monitoring
The more I dig into this material, the more I find people and companies that are developing ideas on energy managment. Living in Norway and looking into this field has some disadvantages: Awareness to energy consumption and systems to increase awareness are almost non existing. Utilities stopped charging for over use and peak consumption a long time ago and since then people have had few incentives for tracking those parameters. Regulations, such as mandatory smart meter installations, are very important for change on a big scale in energy infrastructure at the moment. The previous post targeted independent initiatives to enable people to track their energy consumption and the reduce bill or carbon footprint. Barack Obama throwing money at energy initiatives these days could account for some of google's interest. I conducted a search mission for the energy companies endeavours in the home monitoring market:

Energy Dashboards
The utilities that either have automatic meter readings and many that does not (requires manual readings) have fallen in love with various forms of energy dashboards. Some are real and some are just available as future concepts. Finding the utilities energy dashboards are somewhat difficult, they usually reserve their dashboard for local customers (but might have a video of it) and the independent ones requires that you buy some equipment for it to work.

Haflsund

This is my dashboard. They have some additional functions like comparing consumption to previous years and projected cost etc., but the graphing of actual consumption (manually entered) is the most interesting. As you can see there is a sudden spike, but that is another story. As this is my primary experience with energy dashboards I think we have a long way to go. It has far too little detail, which is not surprising as manual reporting is only required 6 times a year. Anything in between or a missing report is guesstimated. Without real time, frequent and detailed reports it has little value for me. I think I can imagine my consumption graphed over a few data points without this dashboard.

BTW: Received an email seconds ago from them plotting their status on smart metering: They offer a smart meter reading values by the hour (still not real time!). By 2013 all customers on their grid will have those, but for now I would have to pay 2500 NOK (279,36 €) to have it today.

Växsjö Energi

Watching this video suggests that not more than consumption over time is presented. There was some mention of a community competition, but not much on how it was carried out.

Logica

Logica talks a lot of smart grid and it's benefits, but it is hard to track down any thing other than written material on their site.They do reference Växsjö mentioned above.

This nice presentation of their visions and ideas for possible uses in the near and distant future is worth a watch! Examples are "Mobile Smart Metering display" (possible a mobile application), "Follow me" energy billing (all types of energy is paid for and managed by same service)

Grid Point

This company seems to be very streamlined for operation in the smart grid market. They have several products on the market and they have a strong focus on the user experience. Though it is not that available at their site either, this company give at least a few glimpses on state of the art "energy dashboards".
It looks to me that their core business is to sell big battery packs to store energy that can be released at peak consumption to balance grid load better. But then they built the smart grid services into and on top of that to extend their reach and value for customers. Smart move? More on the smart grid with nice graphics here (flash) and examples of dashboard use here (wmv) and here (wmv). As a first that I have seen they include electric vehicles in their grid with their own dashboards and services. The car as a key to home production of energy (Hydrogen economy anyone?) seems ever closer.

Even more dashboards from Cnet.

What did I find?
These added values to the energy services offered are not that easy to verify without actual testing. One thing that can be observed is that they are visual representations of consumption and production that is left to the consumer to act upon. From an Interaction Design perspective they look much similar to performance monitors on PC's and their peers. At most the companies suggest they can compare various parameters against peers in a community, but imagination seems to end there. Imagination not at work at GE.

I am stuck with a feeling that we need to ask; what now/then? When everything is connected, measured and shared, what do we have? Pachube vocally leaves that open to the user of their API, but these questions does not seem to be asked or answered by the key players in the field.

/edit: Even more slick dashboards from various companies.

Social energy meters

2009-02-24T19:42:00.025+01:00

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."

— Lord Kelvin

This quote is central to a range of services that enables the concious energy consumer. The services build upon the activities of measuring, organizing and sharing your private energy consumption data. Originally this activity was done to keep you energy bills at bay, but today this is emerging as a collective effort to reduce global impact of greenhous gases. Statistics inform us that accsess to home energy information results in savings of 5-15% on the energy bill with comparable savings for the environment.

Google Power Meter - focus on display & share

Google recently announced through google.org an initiative for the collection, organization and utilization of domestic energy consumption through Google Power Meter. Although they are not the first, it is worth noticing when the one of the biggest companies on collection, organization and utilization of data enters this field. With partners such as GE (selling fancy smart grids), Google gears up to push policy makers towards open data formats and information flow to enable competition.. Pros: Huge reach that, if sucsessfull, will have an impact.
Cons: Is everything going to be on googles hands?

CurrentCost - focus on measure, display (and share)
At home in UK CurrentCost looks to be one of the more successful after market energy monitors. It is also "hacking" friendly by including means of outputting the data in a readable format for sharing. Pros: Commercial availability is good. Easy to use. Many users.
Cons: Feels a bit too specific for the UK

Wattson by DIY Kyoto - focus on measure, display and share
This enegy meter is sold with a personality and a much more louder "i'm doing something good for the environment" statement. It looks like a flipped shelf and is quite radical compared to CurrentCost, but might not be as intuitive as the CurrentCost device. The visual identity helps building this brand. There seems to be some issues with the companion software called Holmes that have enabled a paralell software and community.Pros: Designerly approach based on awareness rather than cost/kW/h principles. Open.
Cons: Ease of use and accsess to data seems to be obscured by the design philosophy.

Power Squid - focus on measure and sharing
A Norwegian initative by Origo that aims to measure, organize and share data though it's website. Basically they try to find the cheapest way to do it by just directly upload the information from the current sensor to the web and circumvent the local, presumably costly, display device. And they share their progress in a Do It Yourself friendly format.Pros: Trying to be cheap and ubiquitous.
Cons: Some way to go before it is commercial.

Pachube - focus on sharing
I bumped into Pachube while doing my resarch. It is a sensor sharing API/Community. If you have a sensor online, you can share it at Pachube and the sum of sensors are available through The Pachube API to manipulate and use as you whish! Connecting your washing machine to twitter can be done through Pachube: "Miele @la-zy im am done washing for you!" Pros: The Internet Of Things is here!
Cons: What to do with all the feeds?

I would like to hear from you if you know of any more social power meters or if you have experience with such systems.

The SunCat Batteries - DIY prototypes

2009-02-16T17:14:00.010+01:00

Rechargeable Batteries with Solar Cells
Project by Knut Karlsen

At home i always have some batteries lying around, either rechargeable or normal ones. Usually they are empty, but i'd like them to be always fully charged. I could use a normal charger and there is a lot of solar devices that charge rechargeable batteries. I wanted it simpler; why hasn't anyone made a battery with integrated solar cells? The idea of the "SunCat" batteries where born. The batteries should just bask in the sun like a cat and left for a while, in a sunny window, they would slowly recharge.

Prototypes
During my research for my diploma i was in touch with scientists at IFE that experimented with the production of flexible solar cells. They where kind enough to send me some samples in the right dimensions that i could use for the prototypes (full set at flickr):

I had some older NiMH rechargeable batteries that i glued the flexible Photo Voltaic (PV) cells onto. The PV cells are rated at 1.8V and the batteries are 1.5V so they match quite well.

Half glued you can see the really shiny polymer substrate backside of the PV cell. The crude written text says: 3x0,6V B: 13.411.09 Which i guess is the voltage and a batch number.

Using a conductive silver pen and some flat wires from a broken canon lens I made an ok connection to the PV cell.

This setup is infact a (quite weak) trickle charger. It is not ideal, but really convenient. A second version would have some electronics (to check when full) and capacitors to charge the batteries more efficiently, but the battery would then be smaller if it all needs to fit within a C-cell battery.

The sun did not shine today, infact it was snowing. But i'll sure let them hang around in my window and take some more pictures when the sun shines.

Interviews and concept development

2009-02-16T12:20:00.003+01:00

Going through my notebook i've started to weed out some concepts. As of now they are rather unorganized, but they range from rather technical to "design for discussion" projects. I'll detail them shortly.
I will shortly arrange a workshop to elaborate more on the concepts. A goal here should be to focus the concepts into maximum three directions.

I'm also going through a round of interviews with families with different backgrounds. They are not complete or written in a useful format yet, but they are available from my skydrive here:

What have i learnt?
Based on just the three first interviews it is clear that knowledge and experience with renewable energy is very varied amongst the subjects. The different backgrounds leads to different motivation that have a big impact on their thoughts regarding renewable energy. In daily life unplugging leads and switching off lights seems to be a common trait. Again, the focus on lighting as an environmental culprit is a bit strange in regard of its low percentage of domestic electricity end usage.

Sustainable power is unsustainable

2009-02-11T09:32:00.002+01:00

A recent article on newscientist.com sheds some light upon an issue with renewable energy. Various technological innovations are regulary presented as magic bullets that will change our energy production. The article by Colin Barras explain how quite a few rare and non renewable resources are part of this technology and if adapted at a large scale the technology could actually deplete some reseources quite fast. Indium and Platinum are used as examples in this case.

After doing quite a bit of research on the technology and politics there is not that many places one does find critique of this field, though size of installations in nature is a common debate. I have mentioned it in previous articles on this blog, that critique of both old and new paradigms within any field of work are extremly important to innovation. Innovations in renewable energy are often hyped like magic bullets. The result is a Sci-Fi impression of a white and sustainable future. But again, as the article touch upon, the technology itself might not be sustainable at a larger scale.

I Switch

2009-02-06T00:30:00.004+01:00

I was working on a concept on switches when i decided to look into switches i press daily at home. Took some pictures to see if i could use them for something. Never mind the grime and dust :)

Danish interaction design

2009-02-05T15:22:00.002+01:00

Found this at core77. It is a collection of works from students at the Danish Design School presented in an edible format. AHO should do something similar!