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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!"
While clicking "freeplay" yields a bad link, This Link should bring you to a good review of this service...
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.
Trevor Bayliss, the inventor of the original Windup Radio, sprung (pun intended) upon the human power idea whilst listening to or watching a programme about how the developing world was trying to spread information regarding HIV and AIDS by radio but that batteries were prohibitively expensive.
Freeplay was set up to provide these radios to the developing countries at a cost they could afford - partially subsidised by the sale of the devices in the developed world.
It is more likely that instead of this device being designed directly for the likes of you and me it has been designed for the places where mobile telephony is about the only form of telephone available and where electricity is likely to be in short supply or intermittently available.
That we can buy the devices is probably a way to subsidise the sale of them in much the same way as the radios.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
FreeCharge claims their battery will hold 1 Amp-hour at 3.6 volts. That's about 13 kJ, so at 100% efficiency, you could get 180 full-charges out of 1 burger.
Of course, muscles are only about 50% efficient, and require a whole lot of support energy-digestion, respiration, circulation, but let's imagine You are 30% efficient. You're down to 55 charges/BigMac.
Wind-up cranks are notoriously inefficient. Let's call it 30% too, which is probably generous. Down to 17 charges/BigMac. $0.17 per charge
Here in Atlanta, residential electricity is $0.044/kWh, and 1 kWh = 3600 kJ or 280 cell-phone charges. If we imagine the plug-in adapter is 80% efficient, you can knock that down to 220, but you're still looking at $0.0002 per charge.
Don't forget, your Big Mac generates greenhouse gasses (CO2), and actually a lot more, because of your poor efficency.
Yes, agreed. It would be interesting to have a cooling system completely powered by humans and mechanical energy. I see problems with that, but I'm sure that there might be ways to work around it. Maybe we could pump water to pull the fan? I hate to see this turn really complex.
The main problem being that humans generate heat while doing work...
On a slightly unrelated note, I wonder how many kilowatt hours a single "average" male could generate in a 8 hour work day with the most efficient mechanical system.
Less than 1.6kwh. Not very impressive, is it? We can generate around 200W when we're going at a good (and sustainable) clip. Unfortunately we can't run at that level for 8 hours straight... closer to two hours.
MJC.