Baking cakes and other things…
November 25, 2009
We are a small group based in Wales who like to make things, share skills and ideas.
It would be nice to live in a more sustainable world and we are exploring ways to do this locally through Transition Towns, Makerspaces and Open Design.
We have undertaken many practical projects that have been very much in-line with this idea. Including building three wind turbines one at Cardiff University with Engineers without Borders, one with the Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development and one with V3 Power. We have also undertaken a research project to develop open source energy monitoring tools along with a website for sharing the design information and built bike generators.
Get Involved
Please get in contact if you’d like to get involved, share experiences, projects and ideas. We are open to any ideas from sewing to carpentry to baking cakes… if you’ve got any cakes please get in contact!
Contact Us
If you would like to get involved or have any comments or suggestions please post a comment below, thanks!
Hydrogen Electric Vehicles
November 25, 2009
Check out these guys, the car is open source and they’re encouraging the idea of distributed manufacturing, very exiting!
The open source site for the project: http://www.40fires.org
The company: http://www.riversimple.com/Default.aspx
DIY CNC
August 28, 2009
Pretty cool demonstration of a home built cnc:
Imagine what you could make!
The RepRap project – 3d printing
August 28, 2009
We have made a start on building a reprap, the reprap project is a really great project have a look at the video below to learn what its all about.
The OpenEnergyMonitor project
August 28, 2009
click to download project description pdf
Another project that we started and is ongoing is the OpenEnergyMonitor project. It is a project to develop and build open source energy monitoring and analysis tools for energy efficiency and distributed renewable microgeneration.
The project website is: openenergymonitor.org
EWB Cardiff Wind Turbine
August 27, 2009
Here is the first of a couple of posts about the projects we have undertaken in the past.
Over the past year a group of us at Cardiff Univeristy built a wind turbine as a part of Engineers Without Borders Cardiff training. We followed a design developed by Hugh Piggott of Scoraig Wind. The design has been used in development situations and by self-builders around the world.
EWB Cardiff wind turbine
The turbine has a blade diameter of 2.4m. Every part of the wind turbine is built from scratch. The blades are carved out of wood. The alternator is built from 24 permanent magnets mounted to 2 steel disks and 10 hand wound copper coils cast in resin. The blades and alternator and tail are attached to a welded steel mounting which sits on top of the tower.
For more information about the project have a look at the blog.
