This is a cool form of reuse, but there's got to be cleaner ways to do it.

Step into the radiant future of

Solar Gardens!

Coming July 31, 2025

Solar Gardens is a fun-filled, light-hearted tile-drafting board game where each player will take on the role of a visionary architect specializing in carbon neutral engineering to build a rooftop garden in harmony with nature. Guided by principles of sustainability, innovation, community, and strategy, players must work to harness renewable energy to create tranquil garden environments.

In order for your solar garden to be the winner, your goal is to score the most points by building the most aesthetically pleasing solar farms, windmill systems, water filters, and cultural hubs. Solar Gardens is a wonderful opportunity to discover the power of creativity, and optimism where a brighter future is always within your reach.
Can you and your fellow architects create a self-sufficient, resilient garden before time runs out, or will your rooftop paradise dry up?

As a bonus, Solar Gardens is made of biodegradable, plastic-free materials and uses paper stickers to hold the game box together in transit. Also, it is a part of The National Forest Foundation’s Sapling Program where a portion of your purchase of this amazing game will be donated to help plant trees in national parks around the United States–a benefit of the National Forestry Foundation.

DOWNLOAD THE RULEBOOK

Key Details:
2-5 Players
30-45 minutes
Ages 12+

Overview:
Solar Gardens is a tile-drafting strategy game where players compete to create flourishing rooftop gardens by drafting tiles and placing them in their grid, aiming to build the highest-scoring rooftop garden. Each tile represents a different element of a rooftop garden, such as solar panels, wind turbines, plant beds, rainwater collectors, decorative features, and more. In order to win, players must balance aesthetics, energy efficiency, and animal diversity to score more points than their opponents.

Contents:
12 Page Rulebook
Starting Player Token
5 Player Aide Boards
5 Foldable Player Boards
90 Tiles
1 scoring pad
Creative Team:

Game Design: Alex Cutler
Initial Game Development: Eric Slauson
Game Development: Aaron Salmonowicz
Producer: Alex Uboldi
Graphic Design: Bryan Weiss
Art: Daniel Clarke
Editing: Neil Kingham

Really, all this says is "microplastics that fall on soil stay in the soil", but, you know, could be worse?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23993774

Practical Retrofitting for Obsolete Devices | Much like classic cars can be fitted with an EV motor, it is possible to retrofit older devices in order to make them usable again in a connected world

From a commenter under the video:

Summarized the measurements, with rough timestamps:

Stock blades (6:43): 1 m/s, 64.3 W,

simple airfoil (7:55): 0.8 m/s, 66 W

modern airfoil (9:12): 1.2 m/s, 64.5 W

stock motor no blades (13:49): 53.8 W

BLDC motor no blades (16:24): 8 W

BLDC stock blades (18:27): 1.8 m/s, 59 W

BLDC stock blades at reduced speed (19:35): 1.0 m/s, 27.3 W

Scientists and engineers at UNSW Sydney, who previously developed a method for making green ammonia, have now turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the process even more efficient.

Ammonia, a nitrogen-rich substance found in fertilizer, is often credited with saving much of the world from famine in the 20th century. But its benefit to humankind has come at a cost, with one of the largest carbon footprints of all industrial processes.
[...]
But in 2021, a UNSW team discovered a way to make ammonia from air and water using renewable energy, at about the same temperature as a warm summer's day.

Appropriate technology in action. And as a bonus, textile insulation could use material from all those fast fashion clothes dumped in the desert or otherwise abandoned to dissolve into microplastics :/

Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.

The Recreator3D is a low-cost DIY Pultrusion Project; tailored to upcycle aging and salvaged 3D printer parts you're already acquainted with, empowering you to construct your very own pultrusion unit.

​Help reshape our future's recycling methods, one bottle at a time!

Reduce, Reuse, Recreate…with The Recreator 3D!

The Open Hardware Summit took place in place in Edinburgh on May 30th & 31st, 2025.

Since 2010, the Open Source Hardware Association, a 501(c)(3) not for profit charity, has hosted the Open Hardware Summit- a comprehensive conference for the open hardware community and the ever changing open source hardware movement.

Speakers include world renowned leaders from industry, academia, the arts and maker community. Talks cover a wide range of subjects from electronics, mechanics to related fields such as digital fabrication, fashion technology, self-quantification devices, and IP law. As a microcosm of the Open Source Hardware community, the Open Hardware Summit provides an annual, friendly forum for the community.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34584517

Archived

Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are the leading countries for per capita solar and wind generation capacity, according to data by the International Solar Energy Society (ISES).

Furthermore, it explains that global solar capacity has been doubling every 3 years, and wind every 6 years, whereas fossil and nuclear capacity and generation have been almost static in recent years.

[...]

Combined global per capita solar and wind capacity is more than double hydro capacity, and seven times larger than nuclear capacity.

[...]

The leading countries for speed of deployment of solar and wind (new Watts per person per year averaged over 2022-24) are Lithuania, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia and Austria (Figure 2). Most of the leading countries are in Europe, along with Australia, Qatar, China and Chile.

[...]

Solar PV capacity has been growing faster than all other electricity generation technologies combined since 2022. Since 2010, when it started publishing the World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency has vastly underestimated the growth of solar and other renewable energy technologies.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34583551

While photovoltaics (PV) play an increasingly central role in Europe’s clean energy transition and energy independence, a hidden vulnerability threatens this progress: the software-based remote access to inverters, the critical “brains” of any PV system.

“Today, over 200 GW of European PV capacity is already linked to inverters manufactured in China – the equivalent of more than 200 nuclear power plants,” said Christoph Podewils, the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC) Secretary General.

“This means Europe has effectively surrendered remote control of a vast portion of its electricity infrastructure.”

[...]

Further concerns include:

• 70% of all inverters installed in 2023 came from Chinese vendors, mainly Huawei and SunGrow.
• These two companies alone already control remote access to 168 GW of PV capacity in Europe (DNV Report, p. 40), by 2030, this figure is projected to exceed 400 GW – comparable to the output of 150–200 nuclear power plants.
• One of these vendors [China's Huawei] is already banned from the 5G sector in many countries and is currently under investigation in Belgium for bribery and corruption.

[...]

In light of these findings, the ESMC calls for the immediate development of an EU “Inverter Security Toolbox”, modeled after the successful 5G Security Toolbox. This would involve:

• A comprehensive risk assessment of inverter manufacturers.
• A requirement that high-risk vendors must not be permitted to maintain an online connection to European electricity systems.
• Consideration of outright bans for such vendors from connecting to the grid.
• A replication of Lithuania’s proactive legislation – banning inverters from China – across all EU Member States – ensuring security measures apply to PV systems of all sizes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34531692

Archived

US energy officials have found unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices.

[...]

Reuters reported the presence of undocumented and “rogue” communication devices in a number of Chinese-made solar inverters. These could potentially introduce unregulated and undocumented remote communication channels to the inverters, by which an actor could remotely bypass the cybersecurity firewalls that utility companies use to prevent direct communication back to China.

[...]