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Rechargeable Boots
Fancypants writes: "ABCNews.com has posted an article about a Menlo Park, CA company that is developing boots that generate power. Imagine charging your cell phone by walking to class." Seems as if we've done a story before on shoes that generate electricity, but I sure don't see it in the archives.
Now those little blinking lights on my cool Nike shoes can go on forever!!
-Berj
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/22/183825 1&mode=thread
You could make a shoe that smells your feet and applies deodorant when needed... wow
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
This boots could generate the initial energy needed by this Hydrogen-Based Rotary Engine, and with that the uptime of this IBM Linux clock would be astonishing (and with that kind of energy, imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!)!
/. closes the circle!
This things do not happen be accident... people moan but eventually
... would that be sole-ar powered?
Doh!
I'd like to know how much power you can actualy get out of these boots. Charging a cellphone does not need much, but providing just enough for the discman only when you are running would be pretty incentive for us nerds to do some sports, huh?
The previous Slashdot article on this topic gives actual numbers: 0.0013 W when walking normally.
This fluffy article gives no numbers on the performance, but with their menthod it should not come even close to being realistic. When you do the math it is theoretically possible to get resonable amount of power from your shoes, but the technology is still experimental.
As one of the developers of an Open Hardware PDA I can say that you can only do very litte computation for that and it would require an afternoon of walking to scrape enough energy together for a cell phone call.
Just my 2 Eurocents,
Johan.
"But will they run Linux"
(Insert jokes about bootstrapping, etc....)
Tom.
Oh arse
The Electric Shoe Company sells these (or rather, a verion of them).
Tom.
Oh arse
His idea was to use this system of information transmission to enable data-rich handshakes (using connected HUDs) among other things.
I am not actually an expert on the subject but (quote) A tiny battery positively charges one side of the flexible material and the other negatively. As the material is compressed and released ? such as by the foot pressure generated during walking ? the distance between the positive and negative sides change, which in turn creates electricity.
;-)
From what I can remember from science class this seems to have something to do with electro-magnetism.... and for I guess it uses the battery to make the initial electro magnetic field...
PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
From the article (you did read it right?):
>the prototype boot generates about half a watt of
>power -- more than enough energy to recharge the boot's built-in battery and
>a cell phone. But Pelgrine hopes that by the end of January the boot's output
>could be raised to nearly two watts
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
Trevor Baylis, of Wind Up Radio fame, is also working on this kind of technology. The approaches are pretty standard, and are ALL dependent on new materials which combine the ability to generate a current from flexing motion with a long lived flexibility to withstand many 100,000s of flexes over a number of years - often of highly variable force (walking vs running for example).
At the moment the energy that can be created from these is tiny, roughly analagous to the energy created in a self winding watch mechanism pound for pound.
This is going nowhere fast.
The article clearly states thet current models output one watt, with 2 watts projected by launch.
"Baby, when I kiss you, it makes my toes tingle."
"Oh, John, John, I want...Wait a minute! Are you wearing those boots again?"
"My feet were cold, hon. That's all. Cold feet. They don't mean a thing to me."
"I knew it. You were kissing me, but you were thing of them. You've been running around on me. You heel. You're nothing but a leather whore"
"No, baby, honest. It's not like that at all. Sure, the boots and me were an item once, but we're just friends now. C'mon, baby. Can't a guy have friends?"
"You can have all the damned friends you want, John. I'm leaving you. Oh, and just so you'll know: I'm stopping by the shoe store on my way out."
"No-o-o-o-o-o!!!!"
The good folks at the MIT Media Lab (especially under the Things That Think research program) have been researching such things for years.
The July/August issue of IEEE Micro contains several articles on their work, including one on parasitic power.
The wwearable computing crowd at MIT and University of Toronto have been working on this stuff for at least 3 years now. I remember seeing a prototype piezoelectric shoe generator at MIT in 1997. I believe the reasearch was done in the same lab as the PAN (personal Area Network) which allows data exchange through skin contact... AKA a handshake will transfer your business card to the other person's wearable computer.
from what I read at the links this is either a product based on the MIt research or someone re-inventing the wheel.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Humor aside, it's the same reason your car has a battery. It is not there to keep the lights on when the car is parked, but to provide high power (starting) for short amounts of time. The shoes may generate a half watt. Some mobile phones run on 2 watts. The other 1-1/2 watts come from the battery while talking on the phone.
The truth shall set you free!
Hmm....maybe maybe not but /. has certainly previously posted a story on human generated power.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
The more power you generate from these boots, the harder walking becomes. I'm not sure I'd like to generate a few watts of power at the expense of lower back problems.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Wire in a 20V 1A cap. put it on one of those trick handshake things.
Go to a Micro$oft convention.
Drop 'em like fly's
"Hi my name is.... oops dosen't matter"
hehe
Just push it and it will... Er. Wait a minute. Dang, back to the drawing board.
Insert
They'll start running around whenever they need a little extra power. I can seriously see this as a huge motivator for people to excercise.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
OK, here is an idea on how to "build" electric boots. I am giving it away free, to the public domain. Hell, it might already be patented, I don't know...
Build a boot with a fairly rigid upper, or with a frame around the upper, in such a manner that there is a semi-flexible pivot and a fully flexible pivot around the ankle (in other words, make it flexible in the full range of motion of the ankle, but try to keep it mostly flexible in the "normal" direction of motion, in line with the rest of the leg.
Around this pivot you would need a gear system, with maybe a ratchet and small flywheel system (like the baycomm radio), so that as the ankle flexes, the flywheel is spun at a high rate of speed. Perhaps even make it spring loaded, so that when standing still, or during mid-stride, the flywheel continues to run for a short while.
Attach a small generator (one of those cheesy 3V motors would be perfect if made a bit more robust), and tap the power.
Feasible? Sounds reasonable to me, though perhaps a little bulky - but I bet with good design, it could be slimmed down and made to work rather well...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon