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First Wind-up Phone Charger Review
Jonathan Bennett writes "Here's the first actual review (as opposed to speculation) of Motorola's FreeCharge hand-operated mobile phone charger. Only works with Motorola phones for now, but other devices on the way.
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The amount of rigorous cranking it takes to get a charge makes this generator seem inefficient. Maybe efficiency was sacrificed for portability.
Human legs are much more powerful than arms. some sort of foot-operated device would be more tolerable in terms of effort, but probably not as portable. Piezoelectrics that sit in the soles of shoes are not very intrusive, and could provide power over a long time. I believe this is what the MIT wearables group is using.
Hand power, foot power, wind power, and water power require different gearing ratios in order to operate efficiently. An impressive design would allow this type of switch through some type of transmission (CVT? Pneumatic?), and have linkage adapters to hands, feet, windmill blades, waterwheels, etc. The problem is accomplishing this while maintaining a light weight.
According to the article, there is no clockwork involved in the charger. The handle turns the generator directly. The box is already larger than a cellphone, so why not include clockwork? Instead of using hand power to turn a generator, why not use handpower to compress a spring (at a significant mechanical advantage, of course) that turns a flywheel that turns the generator.
Of course it would be much harder to turn the crank, but you wouldn't have to keep up an exhausting pace of over 100rpm. At least in my mind, I'd rather turn a very hard-to-turn crank 10 times than an easy to turn crank 1000 times.
Does this model work? I've seen it work in some of the various other 'squeeze and go' utilities out there. I had a flashlight/FM radio combo a little while back that used something similar (handle, spring, and flywheel arrangement). It was relatively hard to crank, but one or two cranks got you 30 seconds of flashlight or 5 minutes of radio at top volume.
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There are already solar powered battery chargers on the market.
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The FreeCharge should be in everyone's hurricane/earthquake/riot prepardness kit.
There's a much better chance of the cell-phone tower working (they have generators) than the 3 miles of cable between you and the CO still being in one piece. You'll still have trouble getting dial-tone, but that's just a matter of retrying until you do.
Chip H.
That's an excellent point- I heard that some of the other wind-up/solar stuff that's come out in the past few years (radios, flashlights, etc.) was actually developed with the Third World in mind. I wonder if that was the case with this, or it was simply developed for forgetful Western consumers like myself, who can't remember to charge their phones up. :-p
If you are into biking or mountain biking, just rig it to run off your wheel. That way it will charge much more quickly. For that matter, I could rig it to an office chair to make good use of those occasional office chair races. :)