A Solar-Powered soil sensor for serious gardeners

The Edyn Wi-Fi garden sensor will monitor soil and weather, alert your iPhone and trigger a wireless water valve for irrigation.

Accordng to The Next Web, Edyn’s creator, Jason Aramburu, worked as a soil scientist prior to inventing the company’s devices. The product is designed to help both expert and novice gardeners. Fuse Project contributed to the hardware.

The Edyn sensor runs off solar power and connects to your WiFi network. It uses electrical impulses to monitor the state of your soil and then combines that info with other sensors (temperature, light, humidity) and online weather data to come up with recommendations for your garden. If you need advice on what to plant, it can suggest pairings of different crops.

The hose attachment serves as the other piece of the Edyn system. You connect it between your garden hose and a drip irrigation system to automate your watering. The Edyn sensor can adjust the amount of water your plants get if the day is rainy or especially humid.

The Edyn mobile app will act as your garden’s dashboard, serving up data on the state of your plants. You’ll get push notifications when your garden is watered, as well as alerts when you need to add fertilizer to your soil.

The compant’s sensor will cost $99 for backers, though an early-bird tier can get the device for $79. The combo pack of the sensor and the hose attachment will set you back $159. The first shipments are expected to go out in December, with the bulk of campaign rewards arriving in time for Spring 2015 planting. Edyn will also run a Toms-style buy-one-give-one tier that lets you purchase a set and donate one to growers in developing areas, such as Africa.

Kyocera has developed a smartphone prototype that features a display with a Wysips Crystal layer for harnessing solar power

Kyocera is showing a new solar-powered prototype that can also charge anywhere, so long as it’s not too dark or cloudy.

This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Kyocera is showing off a concept phone that uses its own display to convert the sun’s rays into juice for its battery. While we’ve previously seen devices that harness the sun’s rays via solar cells mounted on the chassis, Kyocera’s prototype employs a transparent photovoltaic layer that can be placed on top of or beneath the touchscreen.

According to Gizmag, the specific technology on display this week comes from a company named Sunpartner, which makes a power-generating display layer called the Wysips (What you see is photovoltaic surface) Crystal connected to a chip that manages and converts solar energy into power that can be stored in the device’s battery.

Sunpartner says Wysips is capable of delivering up to 5 milliWatt-peak/cm2, a figure the company expects to soon double thanks to next-generation photovoltaic materials. The layer is only 0.1 mm thick, making it easy to add to a device without impacting the aesthetic design. The company also claims that it will not impact the the display’s touch capabilities.

While today’s high-powered smartphones won’t likely be able to be self-sufficient on solar power alone, lower power devices like e-readers and more basic phones could theoretically go charger free with this kind of technology. A Tag Heuer watch sporting one of these layers is touted as having “infinite power.”

In the instance of smartphones like Kyocera’s, Sunpartner says its technology could offer infinite standby time so long as sunlight is available. Perhaps the best selling point for those who use ruggedized phones in the field is that the solar power layer can essentially offset the battery drain caused by searching for a network in more remote areas and allow for a reserve of power for emergency calls.

While Kyocera seems to be the first company we’ve heard of demonstrating solar power generated from a device’s screen, Sharp did something very similar several years ago with a solar “lid” for a smartphone, but that never really made it to any markets beyond Asia.

Sunpartner, on the other hand, says its system can work on displays ranging from three to 13 inches, including smartwatches, phones and tablets. For more on the technology, check out the promotional video below.

Kyocera has developed a smartphone prototype that features a display with a Wysips Crystal layer for harnessing solar power

Kyocera is showing a new solar-powered prototype that can also charge anywhere, so long as it’s not too dark or cloudy.

This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Kyocera is showing off a concept phone that uses its own display to convert the sun’s rays into juice for its battery. While we’ve previously seen devices that harness the sun’s rays via solar cells mounted on the chassis, Kyocera’s prototype employs a transparent photovoltaic layer that can be placed on top of or beneath the touchscreen.

According to Gizmag, the specific technology on display this week comes from a company named Sunpartner, which makes a power-generating display layer called the Wysips (What you see is photovoltaic surface) Crystal connected to a chip that manages and converts solar energy into power that can be stored in the device’s battery.

Sunpartner says Wysips is capable of delivering up to 5 milliWatt-peak/cm2, a figure the company expects to soon double thanks to next-generation photovoltaic materials. The layer is only 0.1 mm thick, making it easy to add to a device without impacting the aesthetic design. The company also claims that it will not impact the the display’s touch capabilities.

While today’s high-powered smartphones won’t likely be able to be self-sufficient on solar power alone, lower power devices like e-readers and more basic phones could theoretically go charger free with this kind of technology. A Tag Heuer watch sporting one of these layers is touted as having “infinite power.”

In the instance of smartphones like Kyocera’s, Sunpartner says its technology could offer infinite standby time so long as sunlight is available. Perhaps the best selling point for those who use ruggedized phones in the field is that the solar power layer can essentially offset the battery drain caused by searching for a network in more remote areas and allow for a reserve of power for emergency calls.

While Kyocera seems to be the first company we’ve heard of demonstrating solar power generated from a device’s screen, Sharp did something very similar several years ago with a solar “lid” for a smartphone, but that never really made it to any markets beyond Asia.

Sunpartner, on the other hand, says its system can work on displays ranging from three to 13 inches, including smartwatches, phones and tablets. For more on the technology, check out the promotional video below.

Bambootec’s bamboo bike

Bambootec, a consortium from Yucatán, Mexico, has designed a bamboo bicycle that turns pedaling into electricity for charging mobile devices. With a navigation dashboard in the handlebars, this unique bike measures distance and time thanks to a bluetooth connection.

After all, Bambootec’s creation it’s an impressive piece of engineering—particularly if the designs are simple enough to be built by hand by individuals in areas where rolling blackouts are a part of daily life.

Cristina Espinosa López, founder of Bambootec, said to inhabitat.com that the energy transfer is made possible thanks to a converter made of a circuit starting on the rim and proceeding through the system core under the seat, which captures and converts the kinetic energy into electricity. A regulator was also added to the converter, in order to assure that the electricity generated by the bike isn’t unevenly distributed due to variations in speed or quick braking.

The frame itself is assembled with bamboo sticks and resin, instead of metal, making the bike sturdier, lighter and more resistant to heat.

In all, the device sounds like an excellent instance of appropriate technology. The bikes could easily be assembled in the developing world since bamboo is cheap, though certainly not the cheapest material in the world. And the bike could be used both for transport and for charging devices when faulty power grids go out, which can be an hourly occurrence in many parts of the world. Electricity-generating bikes are certainly nothing new, but used it that context, this one could do the world some good.

Solar-powered Activity Tracking Jewelry

Tech startup Misfit Wearables and 120-year-old Austrian jewelry maker Swarovski have come together to put out the Swarovski Shine, a collection of accessories for women paired with two new fitness and sleep trackers. The trackers include a clear crystal face and a violet crystal face.

According to Forbes, the violet tracker is the one that is solar powered by making the crystal bend the light onto the tiny solar cell lying underneath the crystal. And the solar harvesting will only work with the violet crystal tracker because the violet color makes the light more intense, said Joan Ng, a senior vice president at Swarovski–the clear crystal doesn’t produce enough intensity. It takes 10-15 minutes of sun exposure to power the wearable for a few days.

Misfit’s wearable tech already has extremely low energy requirements. “We are looking obsessively at energy at Misfit,” said Misfit cofounder and CEO Sonny Vu in an interview. “We pushed the envelope to make Shine last six months on a single coin cell battery. We tried solar but it was very hard. You need direct sunlight. The crystal bends the light in the Swarovski Shine. That’s how we got it to work.”

The new trackers are being offered in a set along with different accessories, like a pendant or sports bracelet. Prices range from $169 to $249. All of the new accessories, which can be purchased separately, can also be used with the Shine tracker.

Google reveals their first real self-driving car

Google introduced its own, built-from-the-ground-up, electric self-driving cars earlier this year. This has got to be one of the biggest tech stories of the year. However, at that launch, the self-driving mockup vehicle, as Google noted in a Google+ post recently, “didn’t even have real headlights!” It has surely made a lot of progress since then, as the announcement was that the “first real build” of the cute little electric vehicle has arrived.

According to Clean Technica, briefly summarizing what has gone on since the first announcement on May, the Google+ post states: “Since then, we’ve been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car—for example, the typical ‘car’ parts like steering and braking, as well as the ‘self-driving’ parts like the computer and sensors. We’ve now put all those systems together in this fully functional vehicle—our first complete prototype for fully autonomous driving.”

The Google+ post went on to note that people in Northern California would be able to spot the self-driving car on public streets in 2015. For now, the team behind the self-driving car is “spending the holidays zipping around our test track.”

Wireless charging is the way ahead, and we’ve been proclaiming it to be so since quite a while now. Using this concept, Utah State University’s Wireless Power Transfer team came up with a feasible way to mass transportation that could soon give cities a cleaner way to move commuters around.

Called the Aggie Bus, this one functions just like a regular gas-powered bus. The difference is its electricity-powered insides and the way it charges up!

The Aggie Bus uses wireless power transfer (WPT) pads that charge the bus at stops. These wireless transfer pads were created by Professor Hunter Wu and his team at the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative’s Advanced Transportation Institute and can give 5 kilowatts across a 10 inch air-gap!