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Electronic Sensors: Making the Connection Doors That Open as You Approach, Lights That Turn on When You Enter a Room. It's Not Magic or Telepathy, Just Hardworking Electronic Sensor Systems

2. Solar powered air compressor

3. New MIT project could result in cheap solar fordeveloping countries Chris Meehan FEB 07, 2012 Thats the hope of MIT researcher Andreas Mershin, Ph.D., whos developing a material that could bedelivered in a bag and then mixed withlocal plant materials like grass clippingsto create photovoltaics. Actually,Mershin wants to simplify it even more. Ideally, there is no bag at all, just a one page cartoon flyer with universally understandable instructions on how to assemble universally available materialsintosolar-power generating devices , Mershin said. You know, like an Ikea instruction manual.The result could be photovoltaics mixed together in a bucket, painted on a surfacearea, connected to wires and used. It could be huge in helping developing countriesand remote areas get access to energy for lighting, cooking and keeping food safe.The idea is based on work by Shuguang Zhang, a principal research scientist and associate director at MITs Center for Biomedica l Engineering. Zhang derivedphotosystem-I (PS-I), the structures in plant cells that carry out photosynthesis andharnessed them to produce an electric current when exposed to light. However, the effect worked only under laser. Mershins work is in boosti ng theperformance to usable levels, and he wants help.At this point he and his team have boosted performance to 0.1 percent conversionefficiency. But given the cheapness of materials, when the technology reaches 1percent to 2 percent efficiency, it will be good enough for commercial use.Mershin published his research in the open-access journal Scientific Reports onFeb. 2. We hope to have our record beaten early and often by many labs around the world. The real experiment here is to see the impact of the paper. The hope is to

crowd-source enough iteration to achieve the optimization necessary to make the next order of magnitude improvements in efficiency and time life, Mershin said.For this part we still need labs; once it reaches about 1 percent to 2 percent and adecent lifetime and at the expected-to-be, ultra-low cost, I think we may have a disruptive moment to celebrate. But more research needs to be done. When we get to the first Betty Crocker Solar Power Cake Mix

which can onlyhappen after more labs around the world join the currently very niche and "clique"efficiency/lifetime biophotovoltaic race I think this bag will still have to contain four things, Mershin said. The four things needed will be: stabilizing peptides to keep the PS-I fromdecomposing, electrolytic chemicals, a conducting treatment for the sun and somechemicals that will increase the substrate surface structure like nanowires so itcan absorb more sunlight. That last bit sounds tricky, but isnt really. A good example is zinc oxide nanowires that grow automatically when a zincmetal sheet is simply immersed in water containing a handful of non-hazardous,nonperishable, inexpensive chemical compounds, Mershin said. Thus far the lab has made the devices from a number of materials, including bacteria, pine, cypress and coffee trees, according to Mershin. The labs also triedusing seaweed, but they released too much sugar when ground up. Basically, itsreally a whatevers -in-your-backyard approach tomaking your own solar.

4. Capacitive Touch Sensor Project: