Slashdot Mirror
Energy From Vibrations
JN writes "Now here's a nifty invention. What started off as a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Navy to a MIT professor has turned out to become a great mechanism that harnesses running machines' minute vibrations into energy. The possibilities are limitless. Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates, hence promising extended talktimes, and giving operators all the more reasons to get their customers to use their devices. How cool is that? Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
"
On a Harley block these could power my Microwave!
Reminds me of this article. But seriously, wouldn't the daily movement of the cell phone user also be useful? Granted, it's not as vigorous as the vibrate feature, but it has to account for something.
"Crud, I dropped my cell phone. But now I have ten more minutes of talk time! Gotta love solid state!"
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I know plenty of women that get energy from vibrating objects.
So now calling your phone charges it, huh?
ought to patent that.
Insert tasteless joke about Dildos here.
Perpetual motion vibrators!
I've had more experiences physically relocating the phones than them vibrating..(usually by hand and as far as my muscles carried it.)
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics"
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging, but the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
HA.
Test your net with Netalyzr
If ringing vibration will recharge, what about just driving around in the car, or walking. Hmmm, I wonder what an earthquake would do that recharger?
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
Have you ever heard of the Second Law? How do you think you would get the energy to vibrate the phone in the first place? Do you think you could possibly recover MORE energy from this than you put in in the first place?
imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
You'll still need to recharge the phone (maybe not as much, but I'm pretty sure that you won't find that significant of a different from regular phone), otherwise you are talking perpetual motion machines.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Since the posts thus far are mostly about cell phones regaining power by ringing.. Step 1: Vibrate. Step 2: Violate laws of thermodynamics. Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Perpetual Dildo
I hear Kathleen Fent-Malda gets energy from vibrators. I guess CmdrTaco can't satisfy her.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Yes! A phone that charges itself when it rings or vibrates.
And next, we can build a machine that, when slowing down from drag, uses that potential energy to cause another part of itself to move faster. Then, it would never stop. We could task it to make electricity to power... everything!
From cars that have more electricity at the end of the trip than when they started, to bicycles that coast faster when going uphill, the possibilities are... perpetual!
fifth sigma, inc.
... looks like we now have the techonology to build the 'perpetual motion vibrator' for them :)
woo hoo!
Everyone know vibrations create orgasmic energy
Good catch with "extended lifetimes". But consider that the only energy that can be recaptured is the energy expended ringing the phone, and only that portion that doesn't need to connect with the user's ear. Probably not significant, unfortunately.
Car engines. Enough said.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
what you put in so you still need to feed it extra power. i wonder the details as i havent bothered to read the article.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Any energy captured from a vibration recovery system will unavoidably be less than the energy required to make the mechanism vibrate. Now capture of energy from externally generated vibrations would be useful...recharge your phone by placing it on top of a tower with a noisy fan.
If you recover energy from a vibrating cellphone, it will damp the vibration. Assuming that the vibration recovery method is not 100% efficent, you would have been better off just vibrating the phone that much less ans saving the battery for other things.
Unless of course it has MORE than 100% efficiency, in which case our energy problems as a nation are solved!
This is a way to power small, low-power devices parasitically from the vibrations of a much larger engine. Actually very interesting.
The battery is expending the energy to make the phone vibrate/ring. It may be possible to harness SOME of the energy from the vibrate/ring but enough to keep the battery fully charged.
I love perpetual motion machines.
I have a feeling that more energy is used in makeing the phone viberate, and turneing that vibration into electricity then would be generated. By doing this you would lose battery life.
This should be an excellent way to damp noise from vibrating machinery, but you need somewhere to dump the electricity, e.g. a light bulb. So "loud" would become "bright".
P.S. You can't recharge the battery fully from a vibrating phone, because some of the vibration has to exit the phone to tell you it's ringing, and because of the 2d law of Thermodynamics and the fact that it's your battery that's causing the vibration in the first place.
You can't get something for nothing. You might be able to recover some of the energy spent vibrating something like a pager or cell phone, but the battery's draining either way. You're not going to get back as much as you put in.
Now, if you can get your phone to generate power when you shiver, now you're talking! You, the biological engine, supply the input!
but even I can figure out that cell phones are _not_ an application for this technology. This is talking about machines that vibrate anyways, and using the vibration as a means of reclaiming some of the energy expended throught the vibration. Cell/pager vibration will always require more energy to vibrate than they can reclaim unless the efficiency of this mechanism is greater than 100% (and unless my understanding of high school physics is wrong that is not possible.)
Can people read and understand articles before posting once in a while? Pretty please?
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
> one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
I sure hope you are just making a joke. If you're not being deliberately stupid, I impressed by your natural talent.
Anything that obtains energy from vibrations or sound is going to dampen those vibrations or muffle the sound [same thing really]. If phones can save energy like this, maybe you can levitate by pulling your own hair up. In fact, I recommend you try this.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The solution to the world energy crisis! Just slap one of these babies on Pamela Anderson, it would work, really.
/* sig */
If vibration is used to gain energy from it, the vibration will be damped accordingly following the law of conservation of energy.
A phone charging when it vibrates is therefore pointless.
Nevertheless this invention could have a host of useful appliances.
Where do you think the energy to make the phone vibrate comes from?
Getting energy from the vibrations from the environment around a device is a great idea, but the submitter is on crack about getting more cell phone battery life.
Any extra juice you got would reduce the amount of virbation aparent to the user, so you'd have to spend at least that amount of energy extra to still have a working virate feature. You could have even longer talk time by not vibrating at all.
I'm sure (well, I hope anyway) JN had his tongue in his cheek when he proposed a perpetual motion application for this technology.
Remember, they're not just the "good ideas" of thermodynamics, they're the law.
However I do not see this as replacing the AA battery any time soon.
Go calculate something
suck up all the energy so you would not feel
the vibrations?
I drop mine all the time. It would be better to
absorb the energy of impact on the concrete floor.
I'm pretty sure that it would take infinitely more energy to do the vibrate() call than you would generate by the phone actually vibrating. The net effect would be an energy loss. Making the phone more effecient by collecting back some of the energy when the phone rings is a good idea, but just vibrating the phone every so often to create energy won't work.
If you've heard that you can charge a phone by calling it's vibrate() function then I have a bridge and some ocean front property in Arizona to sell you.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
They've been able to do this with watches for years. I had a Seiko when I was a kid that did this.
I would think that it would take a heckuva lot of moving around to charge a cellphone, but I would imagine that there are other parts of a phone that could take that energy and use it. Not everything would have to run off the battery you have now.
No only if they could harness the wasted energy that sites writers use by making all the "high-tech" terms in their articles clickable to websearchs of the said terms to try and make it seem "cutting edge" internet reporting.
Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates, hence promising extended talktimes, and giving operators all the more reasons to get their customers to use their devices. How cool is that?
Not as cool as my solar-powered flashlight! You just shine it on itself and it runs forever!
The really great thing about this concept would be if you could charge your cell phone while driving in the car, carrying it around in your pocket, and soforth.
There are seiko watches that do a similar thing (and there were mechanical watches that did it for years before quartz became the norm) but I am afraid it would be hard to extract enough power from these small movements to make much difference in a cell phone.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
If you harnessed (sp?) the energy from the vibrating cell phone, wouldent it cease to vibrate, and thus be quite lame? The original article is ok, but this poster hasn't really thought this stuff through. Nick Harbour
Nearly half of all people are below average
The poster's assumption that the battery can be recharged by making it vibrate itself is completely silly. Making the phone vibrate uses energy. No matter how efficient the "energy from vibrations" system is - you will never manage to regain more energy than you've making the phone vibrate in the first place.
You can't create energy from thin air. Quit humping the perpetual motion / free energy fantasy - it's quack science. And to think that people subscribe to this site to see articles like this one?
Aside from being critical of the poster, it's an interesting technology. It recalls the days of "self-winding" mechanical watches that used the body's motion to stay keep wound up. I can already think of one possible killer application of this new idea - remote controls that don't need batteries.
I've always thought this is a pretty cool feature of some watches. The perpetual rotor in a Rolex seems like about the same thing. It would be nice if the same concept could be used to create electrical energy for a mobile phone/pda or other computing device.
If this is true, the girls dorm at (insert university here) could power the whole campus!
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
No. No. No. While it's sensible that the technology could recharge a submarines batteries (for example) by harnessing engine vibration, both the engine and ultimately the battery are still getting their fuel from diesel, exploding atoms, or whatever.
You could not effectively use a vibrating phone's vibrations to charge itself. If you could, you would have a perpetual motion machine which is impossible. No explanation necessary. If you don't understand why, then go back to your physics 101 notes.
However, it IS feasible that the vibrations from the human body could be harnessed to power gadgets hanging off of said body. In fact, this is nothing really new here. There are wristwatches, for instance, that use the body's minute vibrations to drive their time-keeping mechanisms.
now if I could hook up my Utah Cold Fusion Battery
I could sell back power to the power Co. every night when I plug in my c-phone.
I'm pretty sure that a call to vibrate() every few minutes will do nothing but drain the battery quicker. Obviously, the conversion from vibration back to stored electricity can't be 100% efficient, so vibrating the phone will always cause a net loss.
As somebody else mentioned, would this be able to harness motion of the phone? Most people lug their cell phones around in a pocket/bag/purse, and they go through a lot of motion in your average day. Given that this technology is purpose-built to extract energy from engine vibrations (thousands of RPMs) it seems unlikely that it could efficiently harness day-to-day jarring of a cell phone. Perhaps a mechanism like that found in self-winding watches (a simple unbalanced wheel and some gearing) might be better suited to the task... anybody know if this would be practical, or if it has been done before?
would be a winding mechanism and possibly a self winding mechanism. Self winding could really be excellent source of alternative energy for such things as cell phones and PDAs, but they would not provide enough energy if the item lies there motionless for a long time.
You can't handle the truth.
Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
;-)
And I thought there was just *one* of them G thingys that needed vibration.
And now its gonna be mandatory?! Every 2 mins?
ahem
This is one slashdot story I'll need to read at -1, just for the vibrator trolls
The actual invention is interesting, but only marginally useful. The idea is to power various low-power sensors using airflow or duct vibration in HVAC systems. This makes possible wireless sensors in some specialized applications. There might be applications in medical devices. But it's not a general purpose energy source.
The vibration of a cell phone is not wasted. It is intentional. To pick up energy from the vibration would be to damp it, then you'd have to vibrate more to get the same alerting effect.
Even if you could get power from the vibration, it would mean that the vibration (which is intentionally selected) is unwanted, or that you would have to crank up the power going into the vibration to compensate.
This supposed energy collector is meant to pick up wasted, unwanted vibrations from engines, ventilation ducts, etc. Not from intentional vibrations.
Infuriate left and right
Imagine this technology in the adult toy indusrty. Doc Johnson introduces the "Perpetual Viberator!!" It's a fantastic investment opprotunity!!
I will now attempt to give some of the lesser intelligences on slashdot (ie. the editors) a clue.
You CAN get energy from harnessing vibrations. That dampens the vibrations. Therefore, if you wanted to use the vibration from a pager or cell phone to charge the battery, you would have to use even more power from the battery to make it vibrate at normal levels. The energy you would get from dampening the vibration would not be enough to make up from the energy you would have to use to make up for the dampening. The only use of the idea presented by JN (and vetted by Hemos) would be to send it to Congress and hope for some Congressmen to include a million dollars of new perpetual motion research in the next farm appropriations bill.
On the other hand, large motors and such do generate large amounts of vibration (and heat) as a necessary byproduct. There is nothing fundamentally impossible with harnessing this. It is almost certainly completely impractical, so you may just want to hook up an electrical generator to the swirlee-wheel on your hat instead.
I dunno about this -- my girlfriend seems to have no energy whatsoever left after I apply vibrations to her for 10-15 minutes straight...
I had an idea kind of like this a while back, when I had to replace the little watch battery in the key fob for my car (the little remote-control that unlocks my doors). So instead of having to replace this battery, I thought it would be a good idea to make it a small rechargable battery. It would utilize the kinetic vibrations of the car, which would be transfered into electricity. Or to be more precise, inside the keyfob would be a tiny magnet on the end of a tiny spring. The vibrations would cause the spring to wave the magnet around, and the moving electromagnetic field would be transferred into electricity.
This would be especially efficient for the keyfobs that are part of the key structure themselves, so that they are directly connected to the steering column (as opposed to the ones that are simple part of the keychain and just dangle under the steering column)
And it's not like I'm claiming originality on this -- I got the idea from a tiny cell phone a friend brought back from Japan. It had no connectors on it to recharge the battery, but the recharger base would vibrate when the phone was set on it, and passed the electicity via electromagnetic fields.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Please. Everyone should make basic errors in logical reasoning in their submissions, that way, we'll never talk about anything else. Slashdot will be ruined. My evil plans will come to fruition! Ah ha ha ha ha HA HA HA!
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
If you reclaimed all the energy it took to vibrate a cell phone, it wouldn't vibrate. That's like an electric motor reclaiming it's power by running it through a generator.
Every device that uses one of these energy
absorbers will "seem" heavier, as the user's
normal day-to-day vibration is captured as
energy rather than being returned to the user
in pendulum motion. The effect may not be very
great, but it may be significant.
Designers of portable gear spend a lot of
effort designing weight and "bulk" (user-
perceived weight) out of their systems these
days.
If you just reduce the vibrate mode of the phone, you'll conserve power, then you'll be able to talk longer. Why bother trying to recover the vibration when you can just conserve power by REDUCING it in the first place?
ppl are now buying 2 cellphones ... cell A rings up cell B, whose vibration causes energy which is again used by cell B to ring up cell A .. :P
Does it mean California has finally solved its power supply problems?
Signatures are for stupids.
12 inch vibrator! Save the environment while you pleasure yourself!
"In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words -- you have to hear the music"
Those squiggly pens could be perpetual motion generators! :-)
Pam and Tommy Lee could have powered the United States while they were together..
The San Andreas Power Plant..
The London Philharmonic Orchestral Power Plant..
Unrepaired PowerMac G4's could power themselves
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
More important than turning the minute vibrations of the device itself into energy would be to turn the vibrations of the wearer in motion into energy... Just like those little devices that measure calories burned or distance jogged based on the bouncing effect of the person running or walking.
This is a good example of such a device.
Turning the device's vibrations into energy is kind of stupid because you'll always run out of juice eventually...
Why do I h8 apple?
one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
Can anyone say "perpetual motion machine" ??
because about 30 people beat me to it.
So just ignore this comment. . . Nothing to see here. . Move along. . .
...and you get front page.
But honestly, the best application of this is powering inaccessible sensors; in fact, reading the article would reveal just that use.
You're not going to get a significant amount of power out of this, but enough to power a little wireless sensor embedded in a piece of machinery, which you could never possibly run wires to or replace the batteries.
BETTER EXAMPLE: Simplified, low-cost tire pressure sensors.
...
Now men can enjoy the benefits of vibration too!
Oh wait...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
the laws of conservation are going to ensure you can't spend 10 calories vibrating to generate more than that, so taking advantage of the already operating equipment seems very feasible but generating new vibrations to power existing devices seems silly. The a mandatory vibrate() every 3 minutes probably is a power waster, while harvesting from the already vibrating ring could gain some energy back. I wonder if it could get so sensitive to derive energy from the rumbling of your HEART :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Everybody keeps harping on about thermodynamics, and transfer efficiency (ok i havent seen any harping about transfer efficiency but its related after all). It would be silly to use such a device to recharge a phone from its vibrations and more efficient just to turn down teh amplitude of said vibrations
Now for a novel implementation:
The harnessing of waste sound. There are many applications where waste sound id generated the first that come to mind are airports and rail stations.
Using a vibration dampening evergy converter would do 2 things:
Reduce noise polution
Generate some small amount of energy
Just my 2 yen
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Hate to reply to myself, but....
What about hooking your sister/daughter/wife up with a phone that generates electricity when she's talking. That could really answer the worlds energy needs...
At least pay for the phone calls themselves...
"Hon, time to call your mother again, the lights are getting dim."
... they'll be telling us that we don't need the airline industry anymore because of the newly invented Heisenburg Compensator.
...and giving operators all the more reasons toget their customers to use their devices.
Unless it prompts the annoying customers to let their phones ring and ring and ring and ring and ring....
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Maybe they could retrofit this technology to work with these.
Not a goatse link
So, if I understand this correctly, I can power my cell phone via surrounding vibrations. So there is a benefit to tossing on the small boss after all.
...are long since debunked, and a vibrating phone that recharges itself falls prey to the same principles. Any vibration you absorbed *could* be converted back into energy, but you would regain MUCH less energy than it took to generate the vibrations because you could only trap energy that was transmitted to certain points on the machine where you planned to transmit the vibration into your "generator." The more vibration you absorb, the less the phone owner would feel. Any amount of vibration you absorbed would be better converted into energy by simply reducing the amount that the phone vibrates and conserving the energy in the first place.
Even with machines for which vibration is a side-effect, sure you could generate energy from the vibrations. However, vibration causes machines to waste energy as the vibrations are transmitted into all sorts of directions and objects nearby, and while converting the vibration back into energy is plausible, you would gain more energy if you simply braced the machine against vibration and prevented it in the first place.
The only way generating energy from the vibration of a machine is the best idea is when the vibration CANNOT be reduced or eliminated. However, logic says that if you can absorb the vibration and convert it into energy, you can absorb the vibration and hold the machine steady, causing it to operate more efficiently.
I'm sure there will be some instances where you cannot eliminate vibration and you stand to gain back a tiny fraction of the energy put into the vibration, but it won't come NEAR to the amounts needed to allow a vibrating cell-phone to recharge itself; that's ludicrous.
Maybe Norelco would love to get their blades on this! I could probably get my lawn cut with one of those cheap shavers for next to nothing!
Morons.
You would "charge" the phone more by REDUCING THE PERIOD OR AMPLITUDE OF THE RING/VIBRATION than the tiny amount of energy you would recover by the unbelievably inefficient vibration-recovery method.
PLUS, any energy you recover would come out of--where?--THE ENERGY OF THE RING/VIBRATION. So you'd have to use MORE energy from the battery to get the ring/vibration to be as loud/hard as it was when you weren't sucking energy out!
Morons.
Jim
The article doesn't say how efficient this device is or how much energy it can capture, but if it is able to generate very much at all...why limit it to use in small time devices. If these could be made be made to work on a large scale, just think of all the things that vibrate all the time. Bridges, for example, vibrate everytime you drive over them, they even vibrate when no one is on them because of the wind passing over their surfaces. Imagine turning the golden gate bridge into a huge wind generator.
Powerlines, too, vibrate whenever wind blows. Imagine a self powering electric grid. Who needs wind farms? And if you do, just stretch some cables across a windy canyon and attach these vibration reclamation devices.
If these things work very well at all, I think it would be shortsighted to limit their use to small scale applications.
While the technology mentioned in the article is quite cool, it has relatively no application for cell phones. It is ridiculous to think that these sensors could harness enough energy from a ringing cell phone to power it (not to mention the whole laws of thermodynamics problem).
What the article is about is using power from vibrating pipes, engines or whatever, to power sensors or other things in places that simply can't be reached by wire, or where batteries are simply impractical. (This also implies that it is really expensive!)
I think the technology presented in the article is similar in function but totally different from the technology used in kinetic watches. The technology in kinetic watches could be really cool if it could be applied to cell phones. A detailed explanation of how this works is available on page 2 of this PDF.
Imagine cell phones powered as you move... That'd be cool. Cell phones powered when you attach them to vibrating pipes or engines? Not quite as cool -- unless you're a robot!
I can't help but let my imagination run wild with the though of a car that never runs out of fuel but has a *really* rough ride...
With the way my car rattles I could convert it to a hybrid gas/electrical vehicle and get about 1000 miles to the gallon!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
It would be more effecient for your phone to just vibrate less intensly than use a device like this to absorb some of the vibration and recharge the battery with the energy it collected. If anyone thinks you won't have to charge you cell phone as long as you hae your phone is on vibrate and you get enough calls should revisit their elemetry school physics class.
A better application would be something where the vibration is an unwanted side effect....like road vibration in a car, build these things into shock absorbers and if the road is noisy enough you could swith off your alternator and improve the gas millage a bit.
Entrepreneurial webcam actresses will finally give something back to the environment
While there are many potential applications for scavenging vibration, the specific example cited in the post is poor. If you scavenge the energy expended to make a phone vibrate it will, of course, no longer vibrate. Sort of self defeating.
The trick is to identify sources of vibration that inherently useful. Could you, for instance, harness vibration from an internal combustion engine? If so, you would improve the entire system dramatically by eliminating the need for an alternator and reducing unwanted vibration with something more productive than pneumatics, hydraulics, rubber bumpers and foam.
Vibration is a profoundly complex matter. People devote entire careers to understanding and mitigating vibration. I have an engine in my car that has two "balance shafts". One of these shafts spins at 2x the speed of the crankshaft. I believe this is because a 90 deg V6 is an inherently unbalanced design. Yet engineers go to extraordinary lengths to mitigate this because the net benefits of the complete package outweigh the cost of creating a lot of additional rotating mass.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Ok, so the poster forgot about conservation of energy with the phone, so what.
What's really scary about this whole deal is that they want to use this technology to put MORE sensors in HARDER to reach places. Just what we need; more devices failing because a 3 cent sensor went bad, and it's impossible to replace.
I don't think this technology is going to be generating significant amounts of power, but the potential of encouraging an increase in sensor use (more importantly BAD sensor use) makes my blood boil.
Don't put more sensors in it, write a better control algorithim!
The next time they have a big earthquake they could harvest enough energy to run the state for decades! Or perhaps they could make these mandatory for use in the p0rn industry, surely they could generate plenty of um, power, there. And having to add additional "energy" to compensate for what these devices are harvesting wouldn't be a big problem eh? Mmmm, thermodynamics!
Now we can tap in a car engine's vibrations to recharge the battery...
Make it more efficient, and it can dampen the vibrations enough to even replace the muffler!
is why we do not see more of this. We have so many devices that completely waste energy. The combustion engine is one of the greatest wasters of energy but it's only recently someone came up with regenerative breaking err braking. The way I see it energy is never actually spent. Energy simply is changed from one form to another as it is used. The reason your CPU gets so hot is because wasted electrical energy is released as heat energy. If they could come up with a more efficient way to transfer heat energy to electrical energy other than a steam turbine then we would have an almost unlimited resource in the suns radiation. Thus far somewhat efficient solar cells are still dissapointing. As far as turning vibrations into energy, it just seems lie a no brainer to me...but I would like to see how they implemented it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
Are you completely stupid? This amounts to saying "imagine an electric car that charges its betteries every time it spins the wheels". If the enery is used to charge battery, then it's not being used to move the car. Likewise, any system that "stores" energy from vibrations cancels (or at least greatly reduces) those vibrations. In other words, a cell phone that charged its battery with its own vibrations wouldn't vibrate enough to be noticeable, defeating the whole point of vibrating in the first place.
If you want to save the energy used in those vibrations, simply disable the vibrations. DUH!
Can't believe that in Slashdot, and in the 21st century, some people still think you can get "free energy"... sigh...
As if I didn't feel inferior to my girlfriends "toys" before...this is gonna be bad.
Stranded.org
So the Navy initially funded this research? Hmmm... So the tiny vibrations normally transmitted through the hull of the submarine as noise now gets converted into electrical energy with a by-product of dampening the vibrations? Very interesting. Not that they need the energy on a nuclear sub, but they definitely don't need the vibrations causing noise.
How about giant seismic vibration grabbing machines built around fault lines? They might not be efficient, but they would be cool!
I could see this technology being useful for future Gas-Electric automobiles.
Then again, I could put a windmill on top of my car and foot-peddle my way to work like Fred Flinstone.
Obviously the idea of the cellphone charging itself by using its battery power to vibrate to recharge the battery is bunk, but that aside, there are plenty of other vibration sources. Your cellphone could just clip onto your dashboard and charge with every little bump you drive over (of course, newer suspensions would make that a little harder to do ;). There are a lot of other vibration sources out there as well.
Vibration can also easily be produced from renewable resources, or as a byproduct of other processes. Imagine on the street above a subway, having a "charging table" which vibrated every few minutes as the train passed under it. Or a wind-powered system to do the same thing.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
They should have figured out a way to more efficiently harness that loss of energy, or designed the engine with parts that better transfer kenetic energy
It's not a matter of not being able to reduce the vibration. It is the vibration of the V-twins that make people want to buy them.
Take away the vibration an no one will want to buy them.
...so I guess a Beowolf cluster of this would look a lot like a laundromat ;-)
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Subject title sums up my knowledge in these fields, so I will do everyone a favor and shut-up at this point.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
> imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery
> every time it rings/vibrates
That's nothing, you just know the women will be clamouring for the perpetual vibrator.
being graNTdead a shipload of funnIE monIE.
lookout bullow. we'll grant you that won.
you can almost hear your hair grow around here at gov.va.msn.?net? (VAST). what style of vibrantshuns is that?
consult yOUR creator frequently regarding matters of the heart/mind/wallet.
With the advent of technologies to turn vibrations into energy, we have a new abundant energy source available:
slashdotters reading pr0n
Using the sheet power of slashdot, a city the size of Los Angeles can be powered for one year.
Slashdotters are proud to solve this countries energy needs.
It is the missing step from the Underpants Gnomes bussiness plan!
1. Steal underpants
2. Install vibration recovery device, microwave energy transmitter and Taco Bell gift certificate and return.
3. Profit!?!
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
The last line of the article reads:
[Ferro's vibration harvesters] are low-power, inaccessible, and expensive to run wires to.
These devices should only be used in close proximity to their power-stores or whatever will be utilzing their energy. Running wires over long distances to harvest energy just isn't practical.
I have a solar powered clothes dryer!
RTFA!!!
thankyou.
Good good good good vibrations...
Sorry, I'll stop now.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
haven't you ever heard of conservation of energy or entropy? Everytime the phone rings, some energy would be used and some of the might be regained, but not all of it, so rining the phone occaisonally would just be a waste because you wouldn't get all of the energy from each ring back.
Now go sit in the corner and think about what you are about to say before it comes out of your mouth.
Taking over one bit at a time...
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging
Classic slashdot. You know, you could actually read the article and find out. You do go to berkeley.
the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
Well, he didn't imply "power," he stated "recover." As others have mentioned, any vibration recovered isn't giving you that tingly feeling that says your phone is going off. So nothing doing there, but Hemos isn't quite as daft as you think. (Insert ./ editor joke here)
What this article is really about (I feel like I'm making Cliff's Notes here for the science-deprived) is not recovering a significant proportion of power from a low-power device like a cell phone. It's about powering a milliwatt-draining device like a sensor off of, say, a megawatt-producing device like a nuclear reactor. This is actually kind of cool, since as the article states (for the literate among you), there are places with no light, no wiring, and a lot of vibrations where you might need power. So this has the chance to do some cool things - just don't expect it to actually extend the life of your cell phone or be a perpetual-motion machine.
On the interesting side, this would make a cool way to create non-powered earthquake sensors. When it gets a quake, it transmits its position and maybe have the power out proportional to power in. You could distribute hundreds of them and have a real-time quake sensor that might be better than triangulating.
Also, could be useful to track vehicles if you slap it on the chassis. Again, deploy once, no worries about going dead.
the fact is, perpetual motion is possible! It's just we are all too dumb to find a way to make it happen.
Proof? Earth's revolution around the sun, the moon's revolution around the earth etc.
So it is possible. We just need to think harder.
Artaxerxes
I don't see why they can't just put a crank on the cell phone like those flashlights designed for Africa. The only place I think vibration generators would be good is near subways/trains etc and they can add to the city's power supplies.
What have you been smoking? If the energy comes out of the battery to run the vibration motor?? How can that save energy by using a generator to recharge??
The only way this can be used is to have the motor used also as a generator when its NOT vibrating.. maybe on an untuned car or a jogging user.
I wonder if a resonating spring and a weight can be attached to the generator inside the cell phone. The user could then whack the phone a few times on concrete for several seconds of talk time... would work best on titanium/carbon fibre phones... with absolutely no warranties.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
That should be companies slogan... at least they got some dissent (or indecent ) exposure ...
Who controls the information, controls the world...
isn't there a rist watch out there that power's itself off teh movement of the wearer's wrist/arm?
Technology Review published an article on related vibrationally-driven sensors which are intended to be used to instrument a building, powered by the small-scale vibrations present in nearly every human-built structure. Cool stuff indeed, made possible because our micromachined silicon technology has advanced to the point where under 100 microwatts is enough to do interesting things.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Imagine. Your systems are running fine, and suddenly half of your sensors stop working. Two days later you find out it's because the HVAC man came around and upgraded all the old compressors' parts to run with no vibration ('cuz it increases the life of those machines, you see), and now all your little micropowered machines have stopped working.
It would seem to me depending on a machine to be inefficient (and thus stealing some of its wasted energy) has this equivalent in the software world: depending on a bug or deficiency in the OS to make your application work. Someone's gonna finally think to fix that bug or deficiency.
fifth sigma, inc.
If only we had these little converters on everybody's keyboards, then all the messages protesting the poor quality of this post could power Slashdot's servers until the next ill-conceived post comes along.
Energy source or a firewall OS?
They cant do THAT!
I have a patent on perpetual motion engines!!!!!!
I'm gonna sue
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
And I'm impressed by your grammar.
Really, you could have done a little better. If you're going to insult someone, try not to make yourself look stupid in the process.
My girlfriend certianly seems to get a lot of energy whenever anything vibrates near her....can I claim patent infringement?! ;-)
-psy
How marvellously novel. I'm sure no-one has ever found a way to absorb energy from movement and store it for later use before, or turn that stored energy into electricity.
And on the subject of using the phone's own vibrating alert to recharge the battery: "Lisa! In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!".
You win again, gravity!
Ok, so given we can't violate the laws of thermodynamics, what if the phone charged itself while in your pocket - due to you moving around?
While most have pooh-pooh'ed this story due to the stupid vibration comment, I'm thinking of something similar to a Rolex watch. You walk and "vibrate" the phone with your kinetic energy. That moves a mechanism (presumably what this story is about) and your phone charges. Kinda like Rolex watches...
Disclaimer: IANAE - I am not an engineer.
Damn thermodynamics... always holding us back.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
doesn't it?
from the ahole punks that cruise the road in front of my house with that 400db thump-thump crap playing. It splits my skull all the way into my house.
They put a ban on it but the kids ignore it. I would like to put bricks through their windsheilds.
They are invading my privacy with that crap.
If you can get free energy from that though, I'm in the green for sure.
3G apps aren't the only things using the vibrate() syscall.
You win again, gravity!
Are solar vibrators!!
Then we could have them power up everything...
The pr0n industry is above the laws of physics! If you don't believe me, go to your local video store and note the DVDA section.
Extracting energy from unavoidable vibrations is cool. You're harnessing an energy source external to the process, which would otherwise be wasted. But trying to harness power from vibrating cellphones is just another variation on all the other perpetual motion schemes... the phone's battery runs a motor to make it vibrate, and then you try to absorb some of that energy and use it to charge the battery? So, for each quantity of energy that you absorb, the phone is vibrating that much less strongly, which defeats the purpose of turning on the vibrator in the first place. And you will lose energy in the various conversion processes, so you will have a net loss. If you don't want to waste the energy to vibrate the phone, then just don't do it. Or, run the motor with less power; this will accomplish the same thing as re-absorbing some of the power of the vibration, but more efficiently.
The power gained by harnessing vibrations must exceed the power used to cause the vibrations. If it doesn't this is worthless in most respects.
Since it is sensitive enough to generate power from the normal activity of ventilation systems, the advent of wearable computing devices will have a source of power that is relavent to when the devices are being used. This could be a real boon for animal biologists, since current tracking collars have fairly limited lifespans. But it's going to be a revolution for areas where power is hard to provide power, and you have irregular activity you want to measure/record.
Anywhere that is seismically active, either naturally, or in close proximity to rail lines, highways, etc. will be able to power gear to help make sense of activity in these regions: better earthquake predictions from sensors that communicate when activity occurs, but that are essentially 'distribute and forget'; orders of magnitude better targeting of activity because you can readily cover large amounts of geography via airdrop instead of sending crews into the field to install powered sites. Traffic sensors/guidance equipment that is embeddded into to the road surface.
If the hardware to capture power can readily be built into infrastructure, this could be highly benficial, for example, in oil drilling; you'd get data from the entire length of the bore. Or the space shuttle could harness many more sensors to measure strucural integrity because they wouldn't need to be wired. Or even smart tools that know when their working parts are experiencing significant stresses.
Very cool.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
First of all you cannot continually recharge a cellphone by using its battery to vibrate and use the vibration to recharge it. You can recapture some of the energy, but you will lose more than is gained. So you wouldn't want to vibrate it uneccisarily.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If your cellphone's vibration and ring sound are turned into energy then its vibrations and ring sound will naturally decrease and thus defeat their initial purpose.
If you want lower vibration and sound you can set the cellphone so it vibrates less, and it will save much more power than any other energy recapture-battery recharging scheme.
There is no free lunch. Especially in thermodynamics.
Pants with a built-in battery charger/leg toner.
Imagine an energy scavenger like this inside a standard PC keyboard. You could power Intels hungriest processors using Windows and Ctrl-Alt-Del...
They have a built in battery charger that runs a set of electrical stimulators for improving the efficiency and power of the walking muscles. Also charges your cell phone, and warms an optional thermos. Nobody sells them.
I think this sounds similar to the Kinetic Auto Relay which Seiko offers in the watches......
In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!
Random is the New Order.
Lisa! In this house we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!
--Homer Simpson
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
"I don't know why we didn't see it before", stated a young lab assistant at the M.I.T center for alternative energy. "I wonder if Thomas Edison truely realized the potential in his invention."
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
"Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?"
No, but you see a great opportunity to show massive ignorance of thermodynamics in front of millions of people.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Perhaps they should have done some research on Vibranium and Wakanda, a technologically advanced country the size of New Jersey which is the main source of Vibranium.
r gy &start=10&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&selm=1999051 3144504.09311.00000096%40ng-ck1.aol.com&rnum=1 4
Vibranium can " absorb and re-channel various
types of energy, particularly sound."
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Vibranium+ene
That explains it !!
It's not their body heat - it's the cell phones of all those sleeping people that power The Matrix.
Now I understand.
What about small windmills in the ducts?
Wouldn't generate much power, but it might be enough to keep a battery-powered sensor charged.
It'd create some drag in the duct, but a lot of ducts are large enough that it might not matter.
It's too bad that you couldn't electrically charge the duct and get power from the differential between the duct and ground.
The earth naturally vibrates, right? Why can't we create something that harnesses the power of the earth's natural vibration to power small devices with low-energy consumption requirements?
As devices require less and less energy, this concept becomes more and more useful
-- Dossy
Dossy's Blog
Our main man Newton's got ya covered like a jimmy hat!
well, you know where I'm going with this one.
come on fhqwhgads
Could something be done like in RF tags, where the power source is the radio signal used to find the item as well? It'd work if the sensors didn't need much power, and only had to be read at intervals, right?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Homer: In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Already some people gave examples of existing vibration -> recharging designs.
I remember watching a program in the BBC about some young engineer's competition. One of the guys (from South Bank University - London?) came up with this doughnut shaped tube, inside which a small iron(?) sphere would roll as you produced a vibration. You know the drill, strap the right kind of metal around one of the sides of the tube... produce magnetic fields... This thing would produce enough energy to recharge your mobile phone, using your body ondulation as you walk. I think that bloke won the competition BTW. Pretty cool. Even though as someone mentioned before, the concept of using a small spring is quite good, if not better.
I recalled something about a piezo generator for underwater use, which relied on the flapping motion of a flag-like object to drive it from a current of water. I couldn't find it, but I did discover this. It would let you power things even if the ductwork wasn't vibrating.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
... that powers my whole home network based on the energy of the incoming packets.
As soon as I get me one of those babies, I'll be ready for slashdotting!
If the vibrate call, made the cell phone vibrate, the energy the cell phone would use in order to make itself vibrate would be quite a bit more than the energy it would recieve back.
If anybody has found a way to gain more energy
back from an action than what you put in, Id love to hear about it.
(Outside of thermonuclear reactions and the harvesting of potential energy)
one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates, hence promising extended talktimes
If this were really possible then it would also be possible to charge the phone by talking to it (producing acoustic vibrations). Wouldn't that be cool? The more you talk the longer your battery life gets!
You have never been in a room full of geeks. My leg bounces all day long. I'm sure if there were some form of generator hooked up to my leg I could power a PDA with a full colour screen. Seriously. Ask my girlfriend, my leg bounces almost all day long, some say it could be nervous energy. I blame it on sleep deprivation. You don't drink... DECAF do you?
we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Everybody knows that.
Woah.
So this is the secret to "recharging human batteries" (those tiny little mitochondria in our cells). Somehow, I'll bet they are able to reclaim some of that back and forth motion, i.e. low frequency vibration (1 - 5 Hertz), to give people a little extra "zip" for a day or two.
Already robotic warfare is emerging. I wonder if WMD will include robots soon.
I know some people who would want one.
The problem with trying to recover energy from vibrations of things like cell phones is that
- they don't get bounced around too much,
- if they soaked up too much energy from the bouncing around, they'd feel like lead on your waist, and
- there are mechanical problems with making a significant weight which can be moved back and forth far enough to recover much of the available energy.
Other avenues appear to be much more fruitful, such as making the soles of shoes (which dissipate energy of flexure) into generators. If you take 2000 steps around the office each day, and with each step you capture 5 inch-pounds of work with each of two shoes, that's 20,000 inch-pounds a day (1667 foot-pounds, about 0.6 watt-hour). Using your shoes, you are the moving mass and the power capabilities are scaled up correspondingly.Plus, it gives you a reason to pace while you talk.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Really? Can it put peanut butter on my sandwich?
Methinks the person does not know what limitless means.
Yeah this is so cool and new innovation. I've been using Seiko Kinetic wristwatch for last 15 years. No batteries as it get's necessary charge from movement when you walk etc.
As I understand it quartz and other crystals have a periodic vibration. (So accurate you could set your watch by it!) Once nanotechnology reaches a certain level I could see harnessing this minute vibration to produce an almost unlimited energy supply.
Recent experiments by Japanese scientists working with extremely thin (a few atoms wide) strands of nickel have seen inexplicable "amplification" effects on the signals that run along these filaments. I wouldn't be surprised if microscopic filaments of nickel or other exotic materials could be coupled with quartz or diamond to produce devices that generate their own energy - albeit on a very minute scale.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Can it really be possible that science education standards have fallen this low?
Let's begin slowly:
The proper use of this idea would be to use the normal motion (such as bouncing around in your purse or bouncing around the front seat of your car) to recharge the battery.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Additionally this could be refined perhaps to be even better than the existing motion recharging devices like watches.
The article didn't address the power output of such vibration-based generators. I suspect the output to be very weak -- on the order of a milliamp or so. Not good enough for any continuously operating device; but good enough for "chirping" devices that occasional report sensor readings.
i would think it would be obvious to this crowd, but it was mentioned twice in the summary alone.
the energy required to make the cell phone vibrate would be more than it could recoup from charging from vibrations. there is no perpetual cellphone.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
great.... One stupid post about a technology that's been around for a while, and i'm stuck in rudimentary physics lessons all day on /. pfft.
rhy
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
now with one device in my pants I can gather up natural gas and electrical charges. How convenient for road trips as you can then just hit every road side dinner and load up on beans, cabbage and turnips.
http://www.seikowatches.com/customer_service/corp_ info/history/history03.html
http://www.seiko-kinetic-watches.com
Same technology has been used by watch-maker Seiko for at least 6 years (I still remember their TV advertisement). The latest is its Seiko Thermic watch which uses human's body heat as power.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
Sorry. It seems to be one of those anime-otaku in-jokes, like CowboyNeal or NataliePortman poll options.... But it was the right thing to say here....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, if sexual energy counts as energy, Nokia already has got it covered.
"That's not an earthquake, we eliminated those years ago... That's a _pick_any_device_ recharging cycle."
And, as a bonus, if they could figure out how to bill people for these charging cycles they could have a new 'free' revenue source to help balance the state budget.
A sub is trying to evade an enemy warship
overhead. On board the sub, everyone is looking
up and wondering when the next depth charge
will drop. In the engine room, the crew is
desparately trying to get the engine working...
Rookie Ensign: "It's quiet."
Seasoned Petty Officer: "Yeah. Too Quiet."
How many other people's first thought on this was powerball, I don't have one but the little motions this talks about makes me think up the same thing.
Ok, the article was interesting, but seriously -- how could one of the editors read that submission and think "Gee, yeah! If someone calls my phone and makes it vibrate, my phone battery will charge!!!"
LAME!
I didn't realize MIT was classified as a small business. Does this mean that they are subject to the same taxes as any other business? Or have they managed to get a loophole added for them like so many other large corporations have?
The possibilities are limitless. Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates, hence promising extended talktimes, and giving operators all the more reasons to get their customers to use their devices. How cool is that? Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
not quite... it uses energy to vibrate... you can't get back more energy than you give.
It is redundant and the joke malformed.
Vibration from trains is emmense. I know, I lived on a darn rail-road for one time, and the stupid train shook the whole hose to its foundation.
Free energy from a passing train would have made up for the loss of sleep and dignity.
I suggest you read Slashdot
It would be so sweet to have a system of ultrabright LEDs powered by, or at least recharged by, a vibration-absorbing power supply. All the benefits of a bike magneto, none of the drag.
I think this would be an interesting application for nanotechology.
I'm not entirely sure about the receiver's physical properties, but I think it would be in interesting idea to have one large vibrating machine (20 inch dildo? =P), and then have thousands of tinly little robots that have receivers, and you wouldn't have package in a battery.
In an environment where things can float along (ie. space, underwater), you could have larger receivers that are like perhaps made like sales or fins so you can gather even more power.
Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
You do not. MC Hawking wrote an excellent article on why this wouldn't work:
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
silly moderators.
You are a moron. Don't submit stories anymore. Don't post anymore. Don't talk anymore. Don't let your presence be known, YOU ARE AN IDIOT. Other posts have already expressed the why & how you are an idiot quite clearly, and I don't wish to be redundant. However, I just wish to make it quite clear to you that you are a complete fucking moron. If anything you said was not idiotic, you would STILL be an idiot, because you would be saying that someone figured out a trick to free energy and all you could come up with as a use was vibrating cell-phones(LOLOMG!!!!!!!!SHUTUP)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It can charge when on the hip.
You simply don't put the generator on the phone -- you put it on the clip. Convert the stresses on the clip to energy. The clip normally deals with shaking with each step, forces from turning, bending away from belt when body positions push against phone...and if phone mounted as a pendulum, there will be amplification of forward-back shaking because we don't walk perfectly smoothly.
1. Pave the streets of San Francisco with this thins
2. Wait for the big one.
3. FREE Megawatts
P.S As a bonus, the energy absorption is going to dampen the effects of the earthquake (according to the scientists here anyways...)
we're right next to a big street, which is currently half torn up-- The whole building vibrates all day long due to the damn tractors...
Oh, well. At least they stopped bashing the sidewalk with the dozer's boom... *THAT* was annoying.
http://www.funreports.com/2003/04/21/46163.html
Since it took energy from your battery to vibrate the phone in the first place, you will lose more than you gain if you try to use that energy to recharge them.
This is basic law of thermodynamics. Did the collective intelligence of slash-dot just drop recently while I was asleep?
Vibrations into energy?
;)
You've just invented the 'microphone'
I demoed a pair of skis a few years ago that had some LEDs in the tips, which were powered by vibrations in the skis. The idea was that converting the vibrations to electricity would dampen the vibrations, allowing the ski to hold its edge better.
An interesting application would be a trickle charger for hybrid cars. If they are inexpesive enough clustering them about the engine could provide a little extra mileage. Every mpg is less oil we have to import and fewer countries the government feels they have to invade. On a related issue I'm curious why there has been no effort to incorporate solar cells into hybrid or pure electric cars? The solar cells could act as a trickle charger. You may not ever be able to run a car with them but on hybrids and pure electric vehicles they could add more mileage. Most electrics fall a bit short of being worth the trouble but if they were able to recharge from daylight while you were at work the range could effectly double. If their range was 100 miles as opposed to less than 50 I think most people would be able to commute without worrying about them running dry. Even on a straight trip you might be able to extend the range by providing a percentage of power from the cells. The range might be extended from less than fifty miles to more than sixty. Nother side benefit would be charging while stuck in traffic. It's a serious worry in areas like LA. When stuck in stop start traffic regenerative braking would be fairly useless at recovering the losses.
Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates What is this, a creationist website? It seems like Slashdot's letting me down every day with just lack of understanding.
Don't forget the TESLA coil!!! Wow! Fun, fairly inexpensive to build, and heaps of electricity for the whole neighborhood. I really think we should use more of them...just think...wireless lights all over the building...everything just glowing and buzzing...ahh....
Heh, I can think of a great way to power a vibration-collector: sitting at a stoplight with some punk next to you with his subwoofer all the way up. :)
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Wow! Great idea! It's like a machine that never requires any energy input! It's like a perpetual motion machine, except it can actually work since it doesn't turn the motion into motion, it turns the motion into energy!
Too bad we can't harness the energy wasted by everyone replying to this article with the same point about the Second Law of Thermodynamics...
You are sick.
:-) Maybe a little expensive, but Hey! I can install Linux on it too!
What we really want is a Smart Windmill that drops the "scruff" birds straight into the mulcher, where
they are converted to compost and go directly to the compost pile without passing go.
The "good" birds (pheasants, quail, ducks) go directly to an automated processing machine and are
inserted directly into the freezer for later use.
Now THAT'S a windmill
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
READ THE PREVIOUS LAME-ASS COMMENTS YOU MORONS!!!
If the poster had heard about the nifty invention used to harness power from light, if he would have suggested the solar powered flashlight.
Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate flashlight - one that charges the battery every time you turn it on. How cool is that?
So if i get alot of calls on my phone when in vibrate mode, the cell if equiped with this technology would charge itself? i wish
It's sad to see articles from people that don't understand conservation of energy. The only thing that would happen with a "mandatory vibration" is a loss of total energy. You can't get free energy from the system. Either the poster got trolled or is just talking out of his ass.
A planet where apes evolved from men? Long live the apes.
My dad did this in 1960 in the plant where he worked. He put a 18 inch Woofer on the wall of the machine room and converted the A/C to D/C and powered a fan for YEARS! No breeze during "shut down" maint. but HEY, you can't have everything!
Bugs -- wireless eveasdropping devices -- that never need their batteries replaced.
Make them voiced activated. Put one every x meters. Have each "chain" the data it picks up, encrypted in a low-power radio burst, to the previous one in the chain, until the data reaches back to your recorder or cell phone or higher-powered transmitter.
Now say hi to Big Brother, or Industrial Spy, or Suspicious Husband.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I'm just sure this is related.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
shake the shit out of it.
Do me a favor and double it!
She won't need you to change the batteries anymore.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I once saw something like this, it was a small hand crank generator that you could use to give your cell phone a 1 or 2 minute charge in case of emergencies, I'm too lazy to find a link right now but i'm sure with some googling you could find it.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
This here app for your GFs phone :P
Just don't forget to give her your phone as well, to charge the batteries
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
It's also confirmed by that vibrating rabbit in the TV ads...
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Please. Everyone should make basic errors in logical reasoning in their submissions, that way, we'll never talk about anything else. Slashdot will be ruined. My evil plans will come to fruition! Ah ha ha ha ha HA HA HA!
[thud]
And things will go back to the 1940s when the US was a better place and women stayed at home and did nothing like they were designed by God to do. And the world would be again run by men, who would revert to a feudal system of government and play war games with innocent peasants for fun. More please.
you still have to feed her...
His quote: "They should have figured out a way to more efficiently harness that loss of energy"
He is confusing an engineering problem with actually giving people what they want.
Asswipe.
But, what about Browning Motion? We could get endless energy out of the phone because nothing ever stops vibrating!
*ducks the pie*
*and the fist*
what an orgy of double-entendres! - for those who can think of other ways to make use of vibrating cellphones, you might like to read about purring kitty, recently developed software to make your cellphone vibrate at length and at call
I haven't even read the thread yet. But I assume there are the obligatory vibrator jokes. I've done a search, and this one doesn't appear to be in the database.
Cool use for this technology: prepetual motion vibrator!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates, hence promising extended talktimes, and giving operators all the more reasons to get their customers to use their devices. How cool is that? Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes? "
The poster really doesn't understand thermodynamics.
Just to make it clear, you will never be able to get back as much energy from the phone as you use to vibrate it. You certainly wouldn't get more energy.
In fact, the more energy you take out of the vibration, the less sound (including infrasonic vibrations that you would feel in your pocket) generated. If you took out all the energy you wouldn't feel anything. even if you could have an 'ideal' vibration->energy converter you would never have anything more then the effect of reducing the input vibrations. In other words, if you vibrated the phone using 10j of energy, and could perfectly extract 5j of energy, the effect would be the same as using 5j of energy to vibrate the phone in the first. Place.
On the other hand, what you can do is grab some of the vibration from the person walking, but I doubt you would ever get enough to use a phone that way.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most of the bulbs you stick in regular incandesant sockets change the frequency they flicker at to the khz range. The old-style tubes do not.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Tiny robots that go around and change the battires!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
To recoup the amount of its power which is wasted simply shaking the bike into its component parts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As with any brand new technology... it will first be employed to help people get their rocks off. ;-)
;-)
I don't think it takes a genius to put the pieces together in this case.
No connection with the product, just information. Check out the Toyota Prius. By using regenerative braking, it gets by with a much smaller engine while having all the zip of a larger engine. My dad has one. Don't let the 1.5L engine fool you. It's assisted by a 25 KW electric. No problem getting on the freeway onramp with it.
The truth shall set you free!
The other half is the lousy writing and complete absence of plot. :-)
with these new-fangled devices, your significant other would have no use for you anymore; she could have a "friend" that powered itself. You'd be replaced by an "Energizer." It keeps going, and going, and going. . .
Charging the battery from vibration energy powered by the very same battery? Get a life, dude.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Anyone?
I figure that we could set this up on the epileptics of the world and pretty much solve that whole energy crisis thing.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
What we really need is a windmill farm that only kills birds that are chickens, de-feathers them and packs them ready for the supermarket, oh and keeps them refridgerated while they are waiting to be collected.
Stick Men
"The possibilities are limitless. Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates"
Trying to charge the batteries when it vibrates would need mechanisms that drew even more energy from the battery, even when you recharge it a bit the net loss would still be larger than without the stupid recharger.
In any case, am I mistaken in assuming that this technology would, of necessity, cause a dampening effect, essentially reducing the vibration of the system? This would be a useful side effect in a number of applications.