As fun as mucking about with simulated environments in a laboratory is, at some point you have to do those field tests to demonstrate that your prototype actually works in the real world, under real conditions. This is what the [Plasma Channel] recently did for their fog harvesting system by setting it up in the Namib desert.

We previously covered the atmospheric water harvesting attempts, using electrostatic precipitation to draw the moisture in the air onto the collectors where it can then be harvested. This is rather different from existing approaches with e.g. fine meshes and hoping that enough water molecules bump into your mesh, so theoretically it should be much more efficient. In the lab it worked well, but reality always has the last word.

The Namib desert is at the top of the world’s most arid regions, competing with the Atacama desert. What it does have going for it is regular fog rolling in that lasts until sunrise, providing a good target for water harvesting. Interestingly, this field test was performed together with the University of Namibia.

Of course, moving the prototype in check-in luggage for the flight to Namibia took some redesigning and testing. Fortunately everything, including the solar panel, arrived intact, allowing trials to commence. This initially took place at the campus of the University of Namibia, joining a number of other atmospheric water harvesting projects that had been previously installed there.

Unfortunately the fog proved to be rather elusive, leading to a few fruitless attempts. It also proved that the salt in the air from the ocean spray, even a few kilometers inland, was highly corrosive, especially to high-voltage electronics. Although the system basically worked, happily harvesting water under the right conditions, it does need some redesign before it’ll be tested next in the Atacama desert.

The world’s refusal to standardize on a single type of mains power outlet has led to a vibrant market of so-called travel adapters, all of which try to outdo each other in convenience and universality. This comes at the cost of complexity, something which ultimately reflects in the price. The cheapo $9.26 universal travel adapter that [Brainiac 75] got off an online retailer’s site is thereby a good example of how safety suffers if the overarching goal is to ‘make it cheap’.

The first exciting discovery is that when you plug any of its three sets of connectors into an outlet, the others become live at the same voltage. This would suggest that they’re just wired together, a fact soon confirmed with a quick resistance check between the respective prongs. Though to the adapter’s credit, the prongs are not live when fully retracted into the enclosure. Yet as demonstrated in the video, the retracting of prongs is not enforced, so mistakes here are possible.

The adapter also has two USB ports that claim to provide 5 V at 2.1 A, with as it turns out no hard cut-off. This is probably the best part of the adapter despite not featuring any advanced charging features. After opening the adapter, you can see that the sliding mains prongs connect to a central bus bar when either unfolded or extended, which is definitely straightforward, but doesn’t enforce that only one type of prongs can be used at any given time.

To make it safer, [Brainiac75] removed the less useful US and UK plugs, taping over the empty holes. It’s now just a USB charger with a universal mains port to plug random non-EU plugs into, which is probably relatively safe and a better idea than really using it as a travel adapter.

A pyrotechnic charge is set off by passing a high voltage through a filament within it, melting the filament and igniting the charge. We could think of a variety of circuits that could do this, but perhaps we wouldn’t have come up with [Michał Słomkowski]’s solution. He’s used the ringer crank generator from an old military field telephone. It’s an old project he’s shared with us due to its recent republishing on his website.

The basic principle is simple enough, winding the generator charges a capacitor bank through a bridge rectifier. Then a thyristor is used as the trigger device, dumping the contents of the capacitor into the filament. But the full circuit has a couple of refinements. There’s a charge indicator circuit using a couple of Zener diodes and an LED, and a filament tester which passes a non-triggering current through the filament from a 9 volt battery. We like the use of an over-the-top high-current thyristor, no doubt what he had in his junk box.

Perhaps it’s a symbol of how far technology has moved, that today it’s surprisingly rare to find a bridge rectifier or a thyristor, and building this device today would involve a microcontroller and probably an AliExpress inverter module as a matter of course.

Meanwhile, should field telephones interest you, we’ve been there before.

Bitcoin Magazine

NYSE-Listed AI Company Taps Lightning Network to Pay Employees In Bitcoin

Publicly traded AI operating system Vida Global (NYSE American: VIDA) has said it has started paying employees in Bitcoin using the Lightning network — but in a way where the company does not have the leading crypto on its balance sheet. 

The Austin, Texas-based company said Thursday that after a worker in Argentina asked to be paid in Bitcoin, the firm tapped Bitcoin infrastructure company Voltage to make the transaction. 

But the company is not keeping Bitcoin on its books: it simply sends the cash amount via Voltage’s platform, the employees receive payment in Bitcoin, and Vida’s balance sheet remains in dollars. 

“Vida has a global team, including team members in Argentina who prefer to be paid in Bitcoin because of challenges with their local currency,” Vida CEO Lyle Pratt said. 

“Voltage facilitates the Bitcoin payments, and we settle the balance in U.S. dollars at the end of the month, just like a standard vendor invoice. It has made offering Bitcoin payments remarkably simple for both our team and our finance operations.”

Pratt added the setup meets employee needs without adding crypto complexity to accounting.

Voltage CEO Graham Krizek said it was solving a mismatch between “global by default” AI companies and payment rails that haven’t kept up.

“Their team members get paid in seconds in the money they actually want, and their finance team never touches crypto,” he said. “When a public company runs part of its team compensation on Bitcoin rails and the books stay boring, that’s the point.”

Lightning is another network that skirts transactions around the main chain, cutting costs and increasing speed — originally designed so people could use Bitcoin for daily purchases.

Bitcoin maxis like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey have since integrated the network into their businesses, payments platform, Cash App and his PoS terminals, Square.

This post NYSE-Listed AI Company Taps Lightning Network to Pay Employees In Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.