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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."
These things look small and light.
I'd love to get a set of these and attach them to the spokes on my bicycle wheels. Swirly rainbow of light zooming across the dark.
No driver could miss me then.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I think self-powered and self-contained light sources are really cool. I'd rather have a Glowring, but they can't be imported for resale in the US/Canada. Any enterprising folks across the pond wish to work out a deal and get me some? ;-)
Method of processing duck feet
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
63 million years from now, some huckster is going to have an amusement park featuring cloned glowing lights.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It might be interesting to embed these into the top of a sidewalk, then watch the sidewalk start glowing whenever someone walks on it, or whenever there are other vibrations in the area. Not necessarily useful, but interesting.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Am I the only one who thinks this would be a neat thing to embed in a clear drumstick and then use at concert?
Hell, disperse the little ones in the crowd and turn the whole place into a giant pulsating light...
You know, I've noticed glowing blinking lights embedded in children's shoes for years. Are those lights battery powered?
These things (or rather, an application of ther technology) would make amazing emergency lighting in offices or homes. Heck, even in non-emergency situations. Perhaps a walkway with peizo-electric flagstones to power the lights along its path?
I wonder how much power could be obtained from the highways and biways of America? All those cars racing over millions of little generators all day long should produce a pretty goo amount of electricity, I'd imagine. It would almost make up for the ridiculous cost of burning all those fossil fuels in the first place.
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
Score: 3, Interesting? Well, at least you didn't get an Informative. You have three links... one is to fiction, so we'll skip it. The two that are to real items have nothing at all to do, shockingly, with the point you're (failing at) making. Both use standard coil/magnet arrangements instead of piezo crystals. Have you ever thought about how much sound energy needs to be traveling through a piezo crystal to generate, say, 1W?
I've had this sig for three days.
they got the idea from the airforce who uses this idea to damp wing vibration.
in both cases active vibration is lighter weight than passive damping materials. (unfortunately the K2s are still heavy as sin, so really it was a gimmick aimed at nerds. still it worked--I bought the skis!)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I once disassembled a early model of solar-powered credit card-sized calculator (one with no battery at all). While holding the circuit board near a light, I noticed a little glow ont he backside of the board. The designer had used an LED as a cheap voltage regulator. The LED lit up to dump excess energy coming from the solar cells.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Is this the same effect you get with those electronic cigarette lighters that make a spark when you press down the button?
You can get a nice healthy spark from those things, which probably has to have a good voltage to jump across the air like that, but the amperage must be pretty low or they'd be deadly =D
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No, because the highway doesn't flex; the tires do. Since it doesn't move, there is no work done. There is a very small amount of heat imparted on the roadway, but not very much. OK, so maybe you make the highway segmented, and use the weight of the car? Ok, the car still has to climb up to the next slab. There are two kinds of people: those who know the laws of thermodynamics are absolute, and those who think the laws don't apply to -their- pet theory.
In order for your idea to work, the highway would have to flex; it'd be like trying to run in the sand. Ever tried running in the sand? It's hard work if the sand is soft. Ever tried to -bike- in soft sand? It's damn near impossible. Etc.
Please help metamoderate.
Don't-don't-don't-don't-look at what's in front of you.
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again);
Men-men-men-men-men go mad with watchin' 'em,
An' there's no discharge in the war !
'Tain`t-so-bad-by-day because o' company,
But night-brings-long-strings-o' forty thousand million
Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again
There's no discharge in the war !
--Rudyard Kipling, "Boots"
Now if those boots had had little blinking lights in them...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There are lots of things in this world that are designed to be in motion. Some of them naturally lend themselves to being made with piezoelectric materials. They are extremely few, but continued research to change that unfortunate fact, as more piezoelectric materials are developed, will allow us to harness energy from almost anything that frequently flexes. It will add weight but in some cases that does not matter. In cases where the materials closely resemble those currently used in flexible items, they should not degrade the quality of the item in question. Thus they are essentially free energy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"