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The Ubiquitous LED Becomes More Ubiquitous
LiberalApplication writes "Piezoelectric generators have been mentioned here before, regarding the military's plan to integrate them into the heels of boots for the purposes of harvesting electricity from the cumulative stompage of a soldier, but now someone has come up with the idea to combine them with LEDs and cast the entire assembly into a little block of resin. Well, a stick, really. If you were getting tired of seeing little blinky lights everywhere, you ain't seen nothing yet."
Actually, on a smooth road these wouldn't work; they require a cycle of compression and decompression to generate power - you'd want nice hard tires and a bumpy road to shake the suckers up.
It would be interesting to know just how vigourously they need to be jostled to generate a given luminosity.
A: Interesting idea.
B: You're kinda missing the whole "conservation of energy" thing. It could never come close to making up the difference.
C: After reading the article, it's clear that converting vibration into current will never create a large ammount of electricity. It WILL create small ammounts just about anyplace, allowing electronics to go without a battery or powercord. Pizo in the road might for various sensors to be included into a kind of "smart streets" (as opposed to "street smarts"). The sensors could then trigger de-icing gear, for example.
Lots of cool little applications. Emphasis on the "little".
I suppose a massive-scale deployment would get useful ammounts of power, but wouldn't be cost effective.
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Fooz Meister