Someone on the list suggested that it might be a hoax (someone having some CGI fun) but one of the long-time list members has history with the grad-student supervisor / prof (Sean built the prof's first quad-copter electronics package) and is absolutely confident that what is shown is completely real and un-touched.
At the risk of repeating myself, I find it to be utterly amazing.
A cooking pot with a 5W, 10W, or 15W TEG (Thermo-Electric Generator) power module on the bottom. The heat source is the hot side, the contents of the pot are the cold side. Must be used with a "watery" material inside the pot (water, soup, whatever).
Looks like they use thermocouple connectors to connect the pot to the control module. The smallest unit puts out 5V @ 1A but they plan to offer 9V and 12V versions in the future.
The stated use is for charging cellphones and such.
This actually looks like it might even work <grin>.
I'm the proud owner of a Bus Pirate and think this tool is going to help me greatly.
I'd like to add a new protocol to the Bus Pirate but am not sure how to go about even beginning.
I'll describe what I want and was hoping that someone might be interested in helping me implement it.
The protocol is a receive only serial protocol that uses a form of MFM encoding. Its generated by a chunk of code that I drop into PIC projects when I want to get some data out of a project that I am debugging.
The protocol is simple:
1) an optional sync pulse of 3us 2) 8 data bits where a logical 0 is 6us LO followed by 2us HI and a logical 1 is 2us LO and 6us HI. Data rate is 125 K bits per second
framing: a period of more than 10us either HI or LO.
Some background: I drop the code that generates this protocol into projects that I am currently debugging. Its designed to share a line that is already used as an output - whether its a LED or buzzer or whatever. It can be implemented such that it preserves and restores the original state of the line when it finishes transmitting the current byte.
I normally look at the bitstream with a DSO set up to trigger on narrow pulses. I can easily read 1 or 2 bytes of data on the DSO screen.
This has worked well for me for many years.
It occurs to me that it should be child's play to decode this with the Bus Pirate. That would make viewing easier and would make capturing lots of data to a disk file very easy.
