Electrical energy is normally generated through heat, motion, nuclear transformation, or chemical reactions, but now scientists at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland have devised a new method that involves mechanical vibrations. They figured out how to "harvest" the vibrational energy that occurs naturally when two surfaces with different work functions are connected via electrodes, and this energy co ...

To measure my electricity usage I decided to build a small system that would count LED blinks on my power meter which indicate the used Wh. It was pretty straight forward system requiring an Internet connected microcontroller to log the data and some sort of sensor that would detect LED blinks on the power meter which is not my property and thus not accessible or modifiable. The main reason to do this proje ...