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!"

Comments

pre-emptive slashdotting?

[CheechBG]

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) :)

Kinetic Charger

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is awesome.

[eugene ts wong]

I've always hoped they could somehow turn health clubs into some sort of mini power station. All that energy being spent on absolutely nothing.

That's an amazing idea. I've never even thought of that. So simple, yet brilliant. I'm not trying to suck up or anything. It's just that the only thing that I've seen as being a hinderance to all of this is that one person turning a generator wouldn't produce enough for him to make it very practical, once you factor in the costs of electricity [from competing sources] and the hardware. However the costs really become reduced once you reuse the hardware, it would really make a difference. I wonder where we could get this ball rolling.

I suppose the energy created is probably nothing compared to that the the club's AC units are putting out, though. The "green" health club would have to have no AC I guess.

True, but certainly the technology is out there to convert back and forth. Who knows? Maybe if enough people begin to use Stair Masters, then there will be a AC generators.

PS. Are exercise bikes (the ones with digital stats) powered by wall AC? It seems like they should at least make these human powered, if they're not already.

I don't know for sure, but searching through google for exercise bikes should turn up a few companies that would give a few specs. It would probably be best to wait to find out later on. I think that it would be wise to see who would be willing to try a new idea.

I'm so interested in this that I'm tempted to present the idea to a few companies to see how well it is received.

One idea, might be to generate enough electricity to turn fans to cool entire buildings. I don't see any problems with this, *if* there are enough people. At Expo 86, they put out a bunch of exercise bikes and people just came up there to ride them to see if they could get all of the lights to light up. As more electricity was generated, the next light would light up, till you reached the top. Perhaps apartment buildings could convert a basement room for this type of thing. People may be willing to cycle more if their own apartments were being cooled off.

Windup linux

[ukryule]

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.

Targetted at the third-world

[davidmb]

Remember that Freeplay came into being to market clockwork radios, primarily to third-world countries where power supplies were unpredictable or expensive.

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...

power sources

[Anonymous Coward]

I've wondered if health clubs/gyms could harness the power from all those excercise bikes and stairmasters as a power source.??