We consider the homology theory of étale groupoids introduced by Crainic and Moerdijk [A homology theory for étale groupoids. J. Reine Angew. Math. 521 (2000), 25–46], with particular interest to groupoids arising from topological dynamical systems. We prove a Künneth formula for products of groupoids and a Poincaré-duality type result for principal groupoids whose orbits are copies of an Euclidean space. We conclude with a few example computations for systems associated to nilpotent groups such as self-similar actions, and we generalize previous homological calculations by Burke and Putnam for systems which are analogues of solenoids arising from algebraic numbers. For the latter systems, we prove the HK conjecture, even when the resulting groupoid is not ample.

In this paper a generalization of the interpretation of Robinson of torsion products as homotopy groups is given. This generalization allows us to define right derived functors of a coproduct preserving functor defined on a small category with all finite colimits to the category of abelian groups. We show that when the category is additive the definition coincides with the definitions of the right derived functors of Cartan and Eilenberg.