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Freecharge Windup Mobile Phone Power Source
Harry Morgan writes: "The UK's Guardian newspaper has an interesting article in it's
Online Supplement
concerning Freeplay's handheld, windup mobile phone power supply
the Freecharge. Although
larger and heavier than several spare batteries, it has two distinct advantages over the former, you don't
have to turn the phone off to connect it and it will never go flat a long as your arms work!"
Back in the early days of telephones, one had to turn a handcrank to get an operator... Then they were replaced with rotary dials... still crankin' but quicker than waiting for personal service. Then touch tone came along.. no more cranking! And now we have this... Ahhh, we've come so far... dan(crank calling)
The Freeplay link is not really a good link... :-/
As for cell phones, I've got myself a Docomo F211i. It weighs practically nothing and I can use it without charging for about a week.
When will the US get their act together and stop relying on those massive bricks?
I have been pwned because my
Very Viridian. It certainly seems like a lifesaver.
Now, if only I could jack it up to my PDA and give it that last few seconds of oomph it needs to grab a critical number...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
and it will never go flat a long as your arms work!
a heavy-hearted sigh is heard from the collective armless community of the world
nice, the host yanked the DNS link before even 5 comments were posted :)
:)
now that's what I call saving bandwidth (and also whoring out the hosting provider's info too)
As well, it will be a good excuse for that overdeveloped right arm (or left depending which way you bat) on geeeks who sit in front of their computer all day.
Rather than constantly cranking your phone to get power (rather like that really annoying flashlight), why not make a round phone and rather than crank it, have an internal crack attached to a string - the Yo-Yo Phone!
Play with it for a while, make a few calls, and play again to recharge.
And if you can do a sleeper for more than five minutes, you get a discount on your monthly phone bill. "Walking the dog" with it will gain you bonus minutes as well.
Anonymous Coward: (n.) 1. nerd at school or library. 2. karmawhore in training. 3. embarrased prep.
You know, renewable resources aside, if you imagine the amount of energy humans consume daily from physical work, and the amount of work it _should_ take (given 100% efficiency) to power these small devices, human effort is truely the ultimate renewable resource. I can't even imagine the efficiency, cost and energy savings of using human effort to offload the power requirements for small devices like this. Think of the energy, no only to produce, but to store, ship, sell, package, etc, batteries for small devices. Gone, hopefully, if this type of technology gains a foot hold (or arm hold, pardon the pun.)
"Old man yells at systemd"
"and it will never go flat a long as your arms work!"
AHA! I knew there was a catch!
Ok, so they swapped out the domain while the slashdot comments were still in the single digits, but they add insult to injury by making fun of my accent, eh?
My mobile phone currently weighs about 150g and is 2cm thick, it is already a burden by today's standards. How many people will actually carry this around with their everyday phone?
The laptop battery version looks promising though, but hasn't a step-charging laptop battery been posted on /. before too.
While clicking "freeplay" yields a bad link, This Link should bring you to a good review of this service...
Is this cell charger really a solution? All these so-called 'solutions' overlook the fact that energy sources are not the problem. The people who live in the third world - and that is most people - do not have anything like the amount of energy consumption that we do. Their low life expectancy and ill health is due to the fact that all the good land is taken up by western corporations to overfeed us, not because of a lack of televisions or electric toothbrushes. These people are living proof that the power consumption of the rich world is totally unnecessary. All these 'renewable' energy sources are not solutions at all, they are irrelevant to the problem.
The major problem that this planet has today is the incredible capacity a minority of humans has to consume ever increasing quantities of everything. This is the problem, yet it is never addressed; never even recognised. Instead the problem is seen as one of continuing to consume as much as possible; of finding alternative things to consume when the current consumables run out. The green gurus keep parroting out the same old crap about treading lightly on the earth, and their followers keep lapping it all up, sending in their subscriptions, buying the videos, going to the meetings, writing their letters, recycling their ideologies and reciting their platitudes - anything rather than face up to the fact that the party is over and hard times are on the way.
We are running out of slaves. There is a world shortage of slave material and the rich idle West is too deeply habituated to the 'good' life to see that it is time to face up to that reality. Never mind all the other species, we don't even provide the whole human population with this level of consumption, most of the rest of humanity are slaves of the west too! The clever slave driver will not drive the slaves too hard; they are no use to him dead. We have not even been clever. Now we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have used up most of the earth's available stored energy, and are laying into the latest deliveries. The soon-to-come shift into large scale plundering of this energy will further accellerate the already alarming rate of devastation. That these 'solutions' are being touted as 'green' is the ultimate example of Orwellian doublespeak. These people claim to be looking towards a new future - as indeed they are, with the same rapacious eye that the first colonialists viewed the 'new' world of 500 years ago.
So what is the solution then? All we need to do is to look at the problem: Consumption. It is very, very simple. We must reduce consumption. Now. Not in 2002 when the UN sets some kind of target. Not next year when the government raises some kind of tax a bit. What kind of lifeforms are we who need some kind of financial incentive to save ourselves from oblivion? Are we really so powerless that we can't stop buying things until the government tells us we have to? Is it really the government's fault that millions of supposedly free-thinking individuals go shopping in vast depersonalised hypermarkets miles from their homes on new bypasses built specially for that purpose?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
> Then I hit the back button and ALL MY FUCKING TEXT IS ERASED!
Use Mozilla. It wont do that.
Also, try logging in. That way I won't automatically lose any sympathy I may have had for you in understanding your complaints.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I have always looked at windup-power sources as having a very limited market.
:
;), I can't really see a market for this.
The thing is, batteries are just fine for most people. The only situations where batteries are not good enough would be
a) when its in storage for such a long time, the battery might die (and this really almost doesn't apply to most modern batteries)
b) when you need so many batterys worth of charge, and its just not feasible to buy more (like hiking, being on a boat, etc)
c) when you absolutely need reliability, and if you use a battery, it could die, and then you would be fscked for some reason or another (again, like camping...)
So it seems to me the only people who would want this sort of thing are people using it in very remote areas, or disaster survivalists.
And here's the problem with those markets. Cell phones are inherently based on having a lot of neaarby infrastructure. You need an operating phone network, an operating nearby tower, and so on and so forth. And when you are in a remote are, those things often just aren't going to be available. The same applies to a nuclear holocaust sort of situation.
See, the success of the freeplay radios and flashlights has been basically because, though they are bulkier and less convinient, they allow for a great deal of freedom. You don't need to have batteries, you don't need infrastructure around you, etc.
And cell phones definately are not "free" in any sense of the word. chances are, anywhere where a cell phone would work, you can find a place to rechange your batteries. So this is an almost paradoxical product. I have a fair degree of difficulty in thinking up any situation where this would be useful. and finally, unlike the flashlight (which, by the way, I own), you would not be able to stop whatever you are doing, recharge, and start again, due to the nature of cell phone calls.
So, aside from the "coolness" factor (which is pretty nifty
Besides the fact that you're going to be modded down so much for this that you'll hit the karma floor (as opposed to the karma ceiling), here's a few pointers.
- First, be very happy that you don't have a Slashdot name, or at least that you're not using it at the moment. This would be known as "karmic suicide."
- Please refrain from being a whiny idiot on any stories comment board.
- Please refrain from being stupid, i.e., making the same mistake not once, not twice, but three times. Also, if it only takes you twenty seconds to type, this whole capade took you a total of one minute. Wow. Big cause for alarm.
- Please refrain from using my favorite word more than necessary. It loses all of its almighty power when people constantly use it.
- Please refrain from wasting my time by posting bull$#!# like this.
- And finally, please refrain from visiting Slashdot.org if you're so p!$$ed off.
Thank you and have a nice day.Anonymous Coward: (n.) 1. nerd at school or library. 2. karmawhore in training. 3. embarrased prep.
Haha - fear my l33t karma-whoring skillz.
Since the site's down, here is the Google cached copy.
i saw a cnn story several months ago about motorola having something similar.
So, that was a British cell phone that the were always cranking on Lassie? Do you have to ask Sarah the operator to connect you too?
MOZILLA IS GOOD BECAUSE IT'S OPEN SOURCE SO IT HAS TO BE TRUE! DECADE UNTIL IT REACHES 1.0 AND IT'S STILL A BUGGY CRUFT-FILLED PIECE OF SHIT. HURBLE DURBLE 1.01 IS RELEASED WITH A WAY TO MAKE NEW SKINS! THAT'S IMPORTANT BUT DOES IT WORK ON LINUX?
Important Stuff:
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Trevor Baylis, idea man behind the Freeplay radio, had previously been working on the Electric shoe charger. But that domain and light searching reveal no sign of its fruition. This story mentions the shoe model charging a mobile device like a phone.
Here is the BBC story on the wind up model from July 2001.
Here is the Wired story from January of this year.
Your sig is the greatest thing in the world. In a way, it's the exact polar opposite of Linux.
People with normal cell phones in cars are bad enough but now they have to concentrate on winding the phone up too?
Yet another reason not to go outside.
was good for something. Now that my forearm is huge (my right arm), my cell phone will never, ever go dead again!
I bought one of their crank flashlights, and it failed in under a dozen uses (over 2 years, scrag the warranty). They have a stupid little rubber band that connects the big post-gearbox pulley to the itsy pulley on the generator, the big pulley somehow grew a huge wobble and threw its belt. At about 3 minutes of life to a 2 minute cranking, it was at most a gimmick.
However, their radio is almost decent, with a 15-25 minute crank life and a solar panel. It's starting to show a wobble in its big pulley, but the slower spinout/drain makes it a bit less of a worry.
You and SirSlud sound like the same crackpot. Your "logic" has too many gaps.
The US feeds the world, not the other way around.
The world has limited air too, so please stop breathing.
I have a watch that uses the kinetic energy from arm movement to keep itself ticking along (ie you shake it every now and then). Why can't they put something like that in a phone? Most poeple carry their phone with them all day, so they could be using it to charge the battery as they walk.
it will be a good excuse for that overdeveloped right arm (or left depending which way you bat) on geeeks who sit in front of their computer all day
You mean another good excuse, don't you?
Can i hook this up to an exercise bike and charge my phone that way daily?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's actually less overhead for us if it was actually pointing where its supposed to be pointing. Unfortunately whoever transferred the
domain to us never input their DNS settings so
it was just sitting there on parked defaults when
this happened.
We're trying to contact the owner/operators now and get the real IP's in place.
Can somebody fix that?
Why has no one imagined a Beowulf cluster of these?
Goodbye karma...I shall miss thee...
/.'ers seem to hate the idea that even a big company can have a good idea or product.
Consumption, by definition, increases demand for goods. Increased demand for goods creates jobs. Jobs give people the means to buy what they want/need. This is good. Consumption helps these areas which are impoverished.
Your arguments are based on false economic ideas. Unfortunately, people rarely understand how economics works. Read up on the issue and I think you'll understand that the problems of the world are not formed by our culture but because of tyrannical or just plain stupid leaders of countries.
Leaving the realm of economics...you speak out against conformity in your post. I ask: what is so wrong with conforming? People don't understand that it is impossible to not conform. You must belong to some sort of 'crowd' to survive, both mentally and physically. You are not defined by the clothes you wear, what OS you use, what TV you own, or what bands you listen to. As such, don't reject something simply because it is popular. A lot of
This is NOT to say that there are not nasty transnational corporations doing bad things, but for the most part in most places where large numbers of people are facing starvation today it is due to their despotic rulers.
Examples:
Zimbabwe, formerly a breadbasket country, is facing famine in large part do to Mugabe's disastrous land use policies.
North Korea, suffering famine recently ( although I haven't checked the status lately ) due largely to the mismanagement of their communist government.
If you really want to know who is oppressing the people of the third world, look not to the developed world and it's consuption, but rather to the pointless excesses of the rulers of the third world.
there are more fun ways to excersize an arm while on the fone with your girlfriend...
.. like curling weights
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
god damn those tree huggers... goddamn them all to hell ** cranks phone **
"...it will never go flat a long as your arms work!"
Does this mean that porn could be considered a perpetual motion device?
"Derp de derp."
The URL doesn't work... you can see it here
This reminded me of the the windup Linux Webserver.
So now, all you need to do is connect the phone up to the webserver to provide the network connection, and you have a fully mobile, fully human powered solution.
Yeah, this is how it all gets started. Those nasty small electronic gizmos will most certainly tell all their bigger, smarter brethren about who was the slave to the machine - a communications device noless. No thank you. I think I'll use batteries instead so that my phone, pda, what have you will not catch on to the fact that I can be used as a power source. The rest of you friggin idiots, you are going to doom us all to extinction. Didn't you pay attention, or where you getting popcorn during that part?
Just became that much more difficult...
(must extend text not to be penalized for one liner)
(mod me down if its not funny...)
I'm a virgin.. Who will give me my first karma point?
Tournament Management Online &
It would be interesting to see what the lawmakers think of it. Although I don't think it would be that much of a big deal, seeing as if you could drive down the road, you might as well just use your car charger.
"it's" means it is
and
"its" is the possessive.
Slashdot's editors make this mistake often. That may have been fine in 1999 where dumb kids had huge valuations, but it doesn't fly in this decade.
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
Tires and Coke go flat, batteries die! ;)
At first, I thought this would be a great idea for an emergency cell phone. Leave it in your car, and if you break down or get in an accident, just a little winding and you can call for help. No worries about batteries dying.
Then I realized that if you got in an accident, you might not be ABLE to wind the thing. A phone meant for real emergencies would need to be operable without having to wind it up first.
I'd recommend using one of those battery packs that takes AA cells, then filling it with Eveready's Energizer Lithium AAs. Not only would they give a long talk time, they also have an incredible shelf life. Ideal for emergency use.
I suppose that this guy, who slept on his arms last night, will have a bit of a problem.
Ah, yes... Kids in the Hall... I miss you.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I'd love to see that happening to use with my PDA. Squeezing the toy would roduces electricity by recycling the wind going thru the whistle using a tiny dynamo. A recharging battery would be located in the toy. The gesture would feel more natural I think. Squeak it! ;-)
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
For a second there, I had to do a double-take.. Just to make sure you were talking about phones...
Sure, mod me down as flamebait. It was just a joke!
This is where the clockwork cell phone power supply comes into its own, providing communications in isolated areas where there might not be a power supply or a land line. Just so long as you're in range of a transmitter...
With a cluster of monkeys cranking a cluster of these you could power one of your Beowulf cluster.
Then crank up your phone and dial up 1-888-723-4628 ...or... 1-888-SAD-GOAT ...and tell Bill your problems! Richardson, not Gates!
I've wondered if health clubs/gyms could harness the power from all those excercise bikes and stairmasters as a power source.??
Well, with this little gizmo, all the unabombers will head into the woods with their hand powered cell phones and a few of these little bad boys and they will be up and running...
:-/
Perhaps an unlikely story, but perhaps someone who is misguided and also has a lot of time on their hands can perhaps spend all day charging these things up....
Cool concept for those who like to camp in the woods but don't want to leave the luxury of a cell phone behind... if they can only find a cell tower now.
It's <URL:http://www.freeplay.net/newsite/product/fr eecharge.html>, actually.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Unless someone has forgotten their car charger (Unlikely - My car charger is often the one thing I remember, as it's always in my car), there is no need for the FreeCharge.
The FreeCharge is good for those who will be going where there is no power - Like on camping trips. Businesspeople don't need it - They can bring their "brick" wall charger and plug it in at the hotel.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
is the philosophy of a cancer cell
Can The Professor claim prior art? After all, he was always tinkering with bicycle-generators and poor old Gilligan was stuck pedaling them.
If we put solar panels on all the cell towers to power those suckers and take them off the grid, and power all the phones this way, then we will have reached renewable energy nirvana. This actually sounds possible. I'd pay $10 more per month for a cell system that worked that way. I wonder how many tons of coal (not to mention CO2 in the atmosphere) a system like this would save.
....Hold on while I pull over and wind up my phone.
It basically doesn't. I believe that historical events can't be proven because to prove it in a lab, you'd have to repeat the specific event. If we repeated one of the world wars, we'd end up having WWIII, not WWI or WWII.
.sig space. I wanted to say something along the lines of:
.sig barely fits.
Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to have much
"We can't use science to prove historical facts, because we'd need to be able to repeat certain historical events."
As it is, my
[Emphasis in the following sentence will be added not to convey tone of voice, but to show contrast.]
However, I believe that there is nothing new under the sun. In other words, although *specific* *historical* *events* are *NOT* repeatable, it is safe to say that *types* of *historical* *events* are repeatable.
When I informally studied economics on my own time, I found that the authors often, if not always, relied on historical events to show that action A would not necessarily result in result Z. I believe that is good use of history, to avoid "repeating it".
On an unrelated note, you might want to take a look at a book about economic history. I can't remember the title, but it was something like "Canadian Economic History". I presume that you are from the US, but just the themes and the overall learning is very applicable to all countries, I believe. The book tried to stay away from morals, and who was right and who was wrong, and even shattered a few myths about white man and native relations.
I hope that clears things up. If you want, you could ask me to rephrase.
testing out my trending skills
I think if you extract some rotational energy from a yo-yo to charge a battery, it'll be a lousy yo-yo... just sort of drop and then not have enough momentum to come back up again.