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Hitachi Shows Off A Fuel-Cell PDA
prostoalex writes "Hitachi made a PDA, powered by a fuel cell. The device runs for 5 hours, and they plan to expand the battery power to 40 hours. It weighs 700 grams, which makes it heavier than most of the models out there. The commercial production will start next year, a picture is available from MobileMag." (This earlier mention of Hitachi's work talks about how such fuel cells could be used to charge or power other things, from cellphones to laptops.)
Although it has a greater cost then that of traditional power sources, it is completely 100 precent pollution-free.
\Pre"cent\, n. [L. praeceptum, from praecipere to take beforehand, to instruct, teach; prae before + capere to take: cf. F. pr['e]cepte. See Pre-, and Capacious.] 1. Any commandment, instruction, or order intended as an authoritative rule of action; esp., a command respecting moral conduct; an injunction; a rule.
Yes folks, that's right! This device follows all of the 100 rules of anti-morality pollution.
may we can finally get more usage out of PDA's for war driving instead of killing the battery so quickly
"Is that a fuel-cell PDA in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me??"
A little planning goes a long way...
Looks more like a stereo! How is one supposed to carry it again? Stuck against a ear, pretending to listen to music?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
I'm not sure I'd like to walk with methanol in my pocket. Hell, one whiff and you're blind... not sure even if it's allowed in a plane.
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...But some self-proclaimed doc stole the plutonium and left me a bunch of pinball machine parts.
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The prototype weighs about 700g, twice the weight of conventional PDAs
Whoa... barely luggable, surely not pocketable.
I think it's a bit too heavy for most people. I know a lot of people that don't use it enought durin gthe day to really worry about battery life. Usually they are back home and can recharge, if they remember.
However, I'm sure there are some people who would sacrifive weight and portability for the extra battery life. Campers, explorers, hikers, skiiers, etc... Anytime you slap a GPS unit on it and head off the beaten track, you will probably appreciate the extra battery life.
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Cool but how much does it save me over than using rechargeable Double-A batteries? I just hope the fuel cells aren't something like $400 for a $300 PDA.
Wouldn't it be a better idea if they concentrated on fuel-cell powered laptops instead of PDAs? I would kill to have a laptop whose battery lasted 40hours, and was topped-up using cigarette lighter gas (butane)!
I don't see the battery manufactures jumping for about this one, if fuel cells do get sufficiently small and cheap then there'll be a few very worried companies out there.
Bob's an avid smoker.
Bob lights a cigarette while doing work on his new Hitachi PDA.
Bob...
*poof*
Bob! Dear Lord, Bob's... Bob's dead!
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qoute from the article:
Although it has a greater cost then that of traditional power sources, it is completely 100 precent pollution-free.
At the moment hydrogen is not environmentally friendly at all. It has te be chemically extracted from fossil fuels or electrically extracted from water. When the times comes that hydrogen is produced with truly clean energy (be it renewables or fusion) THEN is will be truly environmentally clean.
Not so much a "Palm Pilot" as a "Pocket Bomb".
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
little intake funnel, exhaust pipe to get it above your head... headphones to deal with the whine... maybe a pull chord to start it up....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Hitachi made a PDA, powered by a fuel cell...they plan to expand the battery power to 40 hours.
This is incorrect. If the submitter were to take the time to read the actual article...or the editors...they would have noticed this more surprising tidbit:
While a PDA that runs for a paltry five hours and weighs over a pound isn't exactly impressive (quite the opposite, in fact), a laptop with a forty-hour battery [fuel cell] would be incredible. Not only would that solve the problem of waiting for endless charging cycles to complete, it would also resolve the issue of batteries losing their life over time (I type this on a PIII-900 Gateway that scarcely lasts an hour and half with a second battery installed).
The only issue now seems to be rechargability, as I don't believe that this is possible with a fuel cell.
In any case, this is a tremendous step forward.
-Scott
A fuel cell generates electricity when hydrogen from fuel such as hydrogen and methanol combines with oxygen leaving pure water as a by-product.
Awesome, you can also use it as a flask.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
...and if they could make more stuff run on just methane, his grocery bill would pay his fuel bill.
"Dude! Was that you?"
"Nah, man, that's just my PDA..."
Seriously, though, you'd think they'd have applied this power source to cell-phones first, due to their overwhelming ubiquity and constant need for power (although they don't typically drain down as fast as a PDA with a fast processor). Ah, it's probably in the works as well, but it's more forgivable to make a PDA of the requisite size for fuel-cell technology, as opposed to making a cell-phone the size of a portable CD player.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
[i] the only waste will be pure water.[/i] Yeah, a stain will go well with that big bulge in your pant's pocket!
And interestingly enough, in April's issue of Wired there's an article about how battery capacity and power consumption need to be focuses in the future for American companies. I didn't expect to read about some attempts the very next on Slashdot... although granted, Hitachi is Japanese.
- A fuel cell is a pollution-free and highly efficient power source and it is expected to be used for automobiles and in households, although its greater cost than that of traditional power sources limits its applications at present.
This refers to using the cell, not getting the power in it I'm sure. I think making alcohol takes more power than you get burning it, does the same apply to burning in a fuel cell? Or did I accidentally smoke the wrong stuff again?Another thing I didn't get is the expected lifetime of the cell. IOW how many times can you expect to charge the sucker before the same happens to it as did to all of my cellphone batteries. If you are expected to get as much as 40 hours from a cell (which, stripping the marketing hype and suchlike, translates to roughly 20 hours, maybe) does it mean you get 95% of that after the second charge? Or after the 100th charge? Or what? Sorry for being ignorant. If you know, please enlighten me.
I sure hope they get PDAs to the point, where your battery lasts a week again (as it did in my original Palm Pilot) and hopefully it can be done in a somewhat environmentally friendly way, too. Is this the way? You tell me, please (pretty please)
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
I'm wondering if fuel-cell PDA/laptops will be allowed on the airplanes...How fireproof is this staff is ?
From the article " it is completely 100 precent pollution-free."". This is not completely true. It's correct that the application of hydrogen as a fuel doesn't pollute, but the creation of hydrogen does indeed require traditional energy. Besides, the degree of efficiency is not 100%. In other words - if you use 100 kj of energy to create hydrogen, you don't get 100 kj back from spending the hydrogen. So, you could say that this is actually more polluting than conventional energy sources.
Underholdning.info
The only issue now seems to be rechargability, as I don't believe that this is possible with a fuel cell.
Fuel cells are designed to be cheap and disposable, not rechargable. You would carry or purchase them as required.
So a power source you have to go out of your house and actually buy everytime it dies is going to be preferrable to the recharge anywhere there's an outlet current batteries?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"But what about the children!"
Can you imagine the limp you would have in your walk with that thing in your pocket at all?
I think its endorsed by the Chiropractors Union,
they'd make some major money getting that limp back out of your body.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
Finally someone has solved the huge air pollution problem posed by PDA usage.
They need to make this thing chug and hiss like some old coal fired boiler.
"Sounds like Bob is back from Cincinnati."
"Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair." A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
How does this work? Is the actual fuel cell integrated into the laptop, and you just pop a new fuel container into it? And if you have to keep buying fuel for it, is it going to be any less expensive than recharging a battery?
I'd like to see someone try to get on an airplane with that.
Will these be allowed on airplanes I wonder? In a day and age when you can take exactly 2 lithium batteries on a plane but not 3 (because you *know* if someone took 3 they would just blow the entire plane right out of the sky), who knows what the government will allow. The corporate types will probably complain bitterly, (10 hours laptop battery life? Woohoo!) but ultimately it comes down to pushing the terrorist agenda, real or imagined.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The full quote I want to address is this: A fuel cell generates electricity when hydrogen from fuel such as hydrogen and methanol combines with oxygen leaving pure water as a by-product.
Excuse me, but if you're using methanol there's a Carbon atom that has to go somewhere, usually goes as CO or CO2. Although there's some struggle about CO2 being a pollutant, the fact is that you don't only produce water.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
They should concentrate on laptop battery replacement plugins. These don't require anyone to buy into your "platform". It's especially relevant since people end up replacing laptop batteries every year or two anyways. Why not offer a long-life alternative.
Two other good near term applications (things with HUGE batteries)
* Portable power tools
* Radio controlled toys.
* Small electric vehicles (golf carts, pickers)
* Mobile printers
* Mobile speakers
* Headlamps (caving lamps, like Petzl makes)
Future Military applications
* Radio Communicators (walkie-talkies) (the military would love this one)
* Air conditioned "jackets"
etc...
We're still a few years off from a REAL PDA powered by fuel cell. When they do. I hope they don't try to make "methonal only" power systems to pad their bottom lines. Proper fuel-cell systems will be half battery, half fuel cell. People should still be able to get half their juice from the grid and failover to fuel-cell when that fails.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I think wind up technology is more impressive and practical. I own two baygen windup radios that store the energy in a coiled spring, then drive a mini generator to power the radios. They work, the concept works. I also have a small tri-power radio that is very interesting. Shirt pocket size, multiband. It has a built in solar cell which will charge internal fixed batteries (ni cads I guess, never looked at them). There's also a battery bay that holds conventional AA batteries. That's a redundant power supply. In addition, there's a small fold out crank on the side that runs a mini generator to add-to any of the solar input, a couple minutes of very easy cranking gives a long radio play time. That particular thing doesn't involve a spring like the baygens, but it could. either way it works as advertised, it's spiffy.
I think a PDA could be constructed along those lines somehow. The chemistry involved with using normal human muscles is very efficient, much more than other other fuel/power source. A similar PDA could also have an external jack for charging from a normal AC to DC wall wart or another DC source such as from your car while driving or an even larger solar panel/whatever, making it quad power.
zogger
http://www.i4u.com/article1266.html
No they didn't. They developed a fuel cell capable of powering a PDA. Then they stuck it on a PDA assembled from components from many companies.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What a country! :)
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
It's my dream to see wind farms on the great lakes chugging out zero maintenance power for the midwest. The coasts would put theirs in the ocean (of course).
Of course, EVERY house would be equipped with grid inter-tie and solar panels that would help power the air conditioner during peak energy usage (when it's brightest and hottest).
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Or maybe rename "Palm" to "Na-Palm" ?
Hydrogen and methan burns very well.
And can make nice fireworks.
DO NOT SMOKE NEAR YOUR FUEL-CELL PDA.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Certainly not.
The PDA may proeduce no pollution during use, but then neither does My LiIon powered laptop.
There are plenty of Biomass sources for methanol, that is not the problem. Think of all of the energy and pollution used to make the damn thing, and the pollution problem of the fuel cell's platinum catlyst on disposal.
You don't have to recharge a fuel cell! That's the point. The laptop/PDA would be running off of a small methanol cartridge (about 3% methanol, the rest water). When the cartridge is empty, you either buy a new one or refill it and pop it back into the laptop/PDA and you're done. There is no 8 hour wait to reachrge the batteries.
No no no no no no no no!!!!!
The fuel cell is not cheap and won't be disposable even with 100 years of research into it! The cartridge (fuel supply) is either disposable or refillable.
Right now, most of the gear I carry around consists of my PDA (an old 8MB Handspring Visor, which routinely gets up to a month of use on a single pair of AAAs...) a couple of film cameras (a small "Lomo" point and shoot and a Nikon FA SLR) and when the backlight was working on my iBook, I used to carry it around all the time (and plan to do the same whenever I get a new laptop). I also enjoy cycling, especially for long periods of time (I spent a month last summer cycling around various places in Japan), so a set up like yours would be pretty cool.
Also, about your set up, how many modifications did you have to make to get the proper voltage and current? If you have a website or something with information about your gear, a link would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers. :)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I'm not sure I want too look like I've wet my pants every time I want to look up an address.
Hitachi is not the only company in this field. Have a look on FCT Image Gallery for more pictures on this topic.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
For more known dangers visit this link
effusive
overblown
and incorrect.
Plenty of posters have already poked appropriate holes in the incorrect "pollution-free" claim, but what about the overblown "highly efficient" claim? Fuel cell cars have about twice the efficiency of gasoline-powered cars, which is impressive but certainly not the door to energy Utopia.I mean this:
It feels to me that the writer of this article has an agenda to push fuel cells without giving the reader substantive info about them. My other fuel cell articles are similar. What is the source of the hype? The allure of "new"? Hyped claims by fuel cell developers? Or is it too much to ask that tech writers would actually understand the technologies that they write about? Grrr...
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
I'm waiting for the gas powered PDA's to arrive.
Two wrongs don't make a right - but two do's make a dodo
It weighs more than a battery and, like ALL OTHER prototype fuel cells, only lasts a fraction of the time expected of it - less than a comparable battery. It is still uncertain whether this touted efficiency will come through further refinement, that's a total crap shoot.
Fuel cells currently run hotter than batteries, which sucks.
Also, every fuel cell design I've seen produces water vapor. Some of the cells capture and use it internally, but in case of malfunction it could really be disastrous. Especially with the heat problem - with a li-ion battery you might get a firecracker-equivalent explosion on malfunction, these things could become compressed steam bombs capable of fatal damage.
I'm all for improving battery designs. I can't wait until rechargeable batteries last twice as long and run twice as cool. But fuel cells are like taking a huge step backwards in the interests of potentially taking some steps forward at some unspecified time in the future.
I think it's a good thing that others, like Electrovaya, continue to invest in researching advancements for current battery technology as well.
It weighs 6 times as much as an iPod and has half the battery life... I suppose this is just first gen tech so it shouldn't be a problem that it underperforms the market right now.
In a year, let's hope it can reach 20 hours and weigh as much as an iPod ^^
Or... maybe we can see it in a PowerBook! Still, it does seem rather counterintuitive to bundle it with a PDA, rather than a notebook... And that's one big PDA, it looks more like a small football!
GPL Deconstructed
Secondly, fuel cells are nothing more than batteries. None of the proposed "fuels" are available in ample enough quantities in nature to make them attractive as fuels. The likely scenario is a standard power plant generates electricity/energy which is then used to make H2, methanol, ethanol, etc, etc. Its pollution free in the sense the pollution is removed from the mind of the consumer and shifted to larger facilities that do the polluting for you. This might have some pros (easier pollution control at large scale for example), but its important to see the entire supply chain for power. Unfortunately, it seems if most people can't see it directly they think they are doing the earth a huge favor... its this type of NIBY environmentalism that is very dangerous. The real environmental breakthru must come on the large scale power supply side, not the consumer device side... Li ion batteries are as non-polluting as fuel cells in this respect and in fact even less so than this device since they won't produce CO2/CO.
Jeff
They are cheaper than fuel cells, but carry a change for 12 hours in a laptop and a PDa is looking at longer.....the weight?
it weighs 1/4 that of what current li-ion batteries weigh and is super duper thin...like 4 sheets of paper.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Remember lithium-ion batteries used in most laptops are also extremely flammable. In fact, they're so flammable that manufacturers won't sell you raw cells to experiment with, unless you're a bona fide engineer.
However, the energy collection mechanisms for solar, wind, etc. require raw materials. They also require a fabrication process.
There are toxic chemical byproducts from refining the necessary metals, chemicals, and oil (for plastics and rubber) and then again from fabricating the actual turbines, solar cells, etc.
Additionally, strip mining, when used to acquire the metal ore, is environmentally destructive.
Bottom line: clean hydrogen has not been produced yet.
Wouldn't it be great to have a fuel cell powered laptop, where all you have to do is pour in more methanol to get 40 hours' more runtime? Wouldn't it be great if this technology would trickle down to flashlight cells? No more noxious disposable batteries going into landfills, and no more pollution from the process of making them. Methanol is a byproduct of oil refining and other industrial processes. Using it in fuel cells would be practically pollution free, and eliminate other pollution from battery manufacture and disposal.
But wait!
This is not what's happening. In fact, you won't be able to top off your fuel cell with a bottle from the drugstore. What Toshiba, Hitachi, and others are planning, is to capitalize on the lucrative disposable battery/razorblade business model -- with disposable methanol cartridges, like the CO2 cartridges for seltzer water makers, bicycle tire inflators and BB guns. The cartridge concept for fuel cells was supposedly to get around airline regulations about open containers of flammable liquids, but the lucrative disposable battery/razorblade business model is the real reason.
We've all been hearing about how great fuel cells are for years. We've been hearing about new products being put out that use fuel cells, such as laptops, and how energy efficient, convenient and cheap they are.
But when am I actually going to be able to buy one (in the US)? I thought toshiba was supposed to have put out a fuel cell laptop by now, but nooooooo.
Is there some sort of lithium-ion conspiracy keeping fuel cells from reaching the market, just like the gas companies keeping efficient hydrogen cars from hitting the market?
I mean when will we be able to walk into a convenience store and refill your fuel cells? (you do refill them, right?) Is the day near? Anyone have any feedback?
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
"an British"?
Looks like all the ingredients are not allowable on an airplane.
My guess, would be the FAA would not allow it.... because it uses fuels that are banned on flights....
So how about putting a fuel cell in a little black brick with a power-brick cord on it, for the rest of us?
Plug it into your ORDINARY laptop and compute until you run out of gas (or vodka or whatever).
Or plug it into anything else that needs a few watts.
Yes it's not as convenient as having it IN the laptop. But it also puts a bunch of the heat and all the exhaust water somwehere other than my lap. And it doesn't limit my between-fill sessions to the size of the tank I can fit into the laptop.
And like trailer-tow vehicle vs. RV (the former being cheaper long-term because you don't have to throw out the house when the powertrain wears out), the laptop might well need replacing (through obsolescence or breakage) long before the fuel cell became unusable. (Or vice-versa, if the fuel cell becomes poisoned.)
While we're at it, how about a killowatt-level one that runs on odorized propane and mounts in the side of that trailer, next to (or integrated with) the water heater, propane refrigerator, and/or furnace? (Killowatt so I can run the air conditioner "in the wild" - something just beyond a trialer-roof full of current-tech solar panels.)
Building a dedicated fuel cell into a particluar model of laptop strikes me as gratuitous short-sightedness (though slightly more convenient as a laptop than a two-piece model).
(Now if this were Sony I'd expect them to be playing status games, with the high-end maximally-overpriced laptop having a larger tank than the next one down (at a cost differential FAR beyond any manufacturing cost times markup difference), and brick-chargers (in ugly bricks) for their less-well-heeled customers.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
go figure...
What happens when the catalyst get poisoned? Normally, reactivation is needed (typically heating it up) from time to time to ensure that the molecular sites where the combination occurs remain free of contamination.
With all this talk about alternate energy sources, why doesn't someone capitalize on the most efficient and abundant source we have right now, us. Not the Matrix type mind you (although I know a few people who would be more valueble as firewood).
I seen mention of hand cranks and bike genorators, but no one is too keen on cranking something while in the middle of this or that, and most people don't ride a bike regularly enough to recharge their devices (although it's never a bad idea to go out and excercise).
What people DO do all the time is walk, be it to the bathroom or to work. Even the most lazy of us walks at LEAST a few miles a work day. What about adding small generators in a pair of shoes? Gravity is pulling our feet to the ground with every step, and I'd imagine that a few hundred pounds of pressure (or more depending on how hard you step down)would generate a fair amount of energy, which ends up being absorbed by the shoe. Multiply that by a couple of thousand steps and you should at least have enough to recharge a cell phone or PDA.
Of course, the problem would most likely be the elements (water/dirt particles) and getting the energy to the device. It'd probably look stupid have a few AA's strapped to your shoe, or a wire running from your pda to your shoes. Not to mention the heat that could be generated from them (although it would be nice in freezing weather.
I dunno, seems like a logical step to me (NPI), seeing as it is essential for (most of) us to walk, why not harness it? Hell, it could even double as nice insole shock absorbers.
At least it would justify paying $200 for a pair of freakin shoes.
Gair
You mean it's mass is 700 Grams it's weight would be in Newtons. :op
Jeeze, I guess the Japanese are jealous that the X-Box controller is so huge, because this PDA dwarfs even that. They should have just slapped a keyboard onto it and marketed it as a subnotebook.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
hydrogen hydroxide, you insensitive clod!
hydrogen = H+
hydroxide = OH-
hydrogen hydrixide = HOH
Every time you run "emerge", a Microsoft drone dies.