Check out this cool Pizza Box Solar Cooker which is very simple to make and you can cook pizza if you don’t have a microwave or an oven. This Pizza Box Solar Oven can reach up to temperatures of 275 Fahrenheit! Nice…

Check out these really large solar cookers you can use to cook some food. Maybe they will be able to commercialize this and let people cook some steaks on it instead of using up our precious earth resources.

One of the easiest beginnings for a parabolic solar cooker can be found in thousands of backyards across the United States-the satellite dish, from the large C-band to the small digital dish. What happens to these relics once they are discarded? They are large and awkward and not easily recycled. Building your own solar cooker is a great way to reuse these parabolic-shaped units while reducing waste in the landfill.

Wow, check out this cool energy saving house!

The balcony rail is a solar vacuum tube to heat water. Photovoltaics on the roof rotate independently to track the sun, generating four to six times the energy needed for the house, making it beyond zero energy and into “das Plusenergiehaus” or a “Plus-energy House.” If that is not enough, there is on-site composting, chemical free sewage treatment and rainwater catchment.

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Check out some of the cool stuff and people that are going to be at the Maker Faire! (Including us but we have no idea what to bring…yet)

We will get to play with an electric giraff (hopefully) and meet with submarine maker Mike Wernecke.

You can get some tickets for the Maker Faire in San Mateo Fairgrounds here.  And check out Maker Faire in detail here.

There’s some cool Maker Faire Pictures from back in the day here.

More Past Participants and Pics from Maker Faire’s Past

• Engadget at Maker Faire Part I
• Engadget at Maker Faire Part II
• BoingBoing and LaughingSquid
• CNET at MakerFaire

Check out some of the cool Antartic autonomous solar robots being developed here. Above is a picture of a guy (yes holding a laptop), snow-surfing at about 5mph…

Not too bad on solar power, we give thumbs up for that.

One morning, while taking walking behind the robot and dragging a sled of equipment for quantitatively measuring the strength and cohesion of the snow underfoot, we realized what fools we were to man-haul the equipment ourselves. And, for that matter, how silly even to walk. So, we hooked the sled to the robot and went for a ride. The robot, it turns out, can haul its own weight (nearly 200 lbs.) on a sled and hardly notice it.

This image was another born out of spontaneity, and yet has become of the most popular images from the whole project. Snow surfing behind the robot is not very exciting however; it only travels at a slow walking pace.

Wow, check out this awesome window shade that also acts as a solar powered light!

This is a continuation of a project from Design for the 5 Senses that I worked on with Michael Jefferson and Jae In Lee. It’s a window shade that doubles as a light. One set of strings would be to control the level of sunlight by adjusting the height of the shade. The other set of strings controls the light level. I didn’t have time to add a solar component to it for that class, so I decided to work on this for Advanced Tech. There is some general “design” info here and a list of resources, but this page is mainly tech documentation of the solar component. Please see links on the left for more background & project info and images.

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Okay, I’ve finally been able to stay away from the computer thanks to my girlfriend. But we are back for some more hacks and DIYs.

Check out these cool solar lawnmower robots and mop robot if you don’t want to spend $200 on a Roomba. You could probably make these inventions a little bit smart by adding a programmable controllers such as CUBLOC or Make controllers… Arduino would be good too.

Solar Lawnmower robot: tired to cut your grass? you have just to press a button and the robot do the job for you. Once the job done and the robot stopped, it’s internal battery is solar charged: no cost. The solar lawnmower robot is very quiet and make about the same noise as an electric razor!

-Mop robot: tired to use mop to wash your floors? Throw away you mop: use mop robot, add a bit of water, some liquid soap and just press the button: the robot is stupid, slow but it does the job alone and quietly.

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