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Hamster-Powered Night Light
An anonymous reader writes "Though Skippy the Hamster powers this night light by running on his excercise wheel, the same concepts and low-rpm alternator design could be applied to a school science project using different energy sources! A small wind or hydro turbine could easily power this alternator. The Otherpower.com staff thought of building a hamster-powered nightlight a couple years ago at a rather, uh, soused company Christmas party. Then recently Analise, an 8th grader from Albuquerque, NM, contacted DanF through the AllExperts.com Science For Kids forum, asking 'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?'"
I got about 1 Watt from my electric hamster but I think you could get much better from the real thing.
1 watt is enough to power a few LEDs. (Or an asynchronous microprocessor)
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Check out google's use of pigeon power, it's The technology behind Google's great results
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
This is basically an IIRC (if I recall correctly), but for those of you wanting to know what humans can do along these lines...
1. With a stationary bicycle hooked up to a small generator, a human who is classified as in moderate shape can power a 13 inch black and white television at about an even rate - pedal for half an hour, watch for half an hour.
2. it takes a near olympic grade athelete to power a 19 inch color set continuously and even then, it's a for a single half hour program or less. Mere mortal cyclists can charge a battery and get about a half hour of TV for over an hour's pedalling.
3. Those first two examples are based on 1980's era designs. These days, half an hour of cycling should be able to charge a laptop battery for about 4 hours use, or load up all the rechargeable batteries for several portable music players and portable game systems, and a bit extra for your flashlights.
I'd document these claims in detail and with rigor, but really, the frackin article started off with frackin hamsters and I just thought of a really dumb joke - see my next post.
Who is John Cabal?
On a treadmill, an adult male can probably sustain a power output of about 100W. For humans, bicycles are more efficient than treadmills. I've generated an average power of 200W for 2 hours on a stationary bike and I'm a middle-aged geek, not an athlete.
People are usually interested in this to figure out their calorie burn rate. Here are the conversions:
1 dietary calorie = 1000 calories = 4186.8 joules = 4186.8 watt-seconds = 0.001163 kWh
Human efficiency is 20-25%, so you can calculate that you actually burn 4 or 5 dietary calories for every 4000 J of mechanical energy you produce.
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"Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?"
m mals/9801.jpg
Well it methinks it all depends how big the rodent is... AFAIK the capybara is the biggest rodent.
From the size of it I guess it could generate enough electric juice to power a high power halogen lamp.
Here are some pics of the beast:
http://www.rebsig.com/capybara/capy2.jpg
http://stockpix.com/stock/animals/mammals/smallma
- "They misunderestimated me."
I'm all for this, but you have to realize that the economics don't work.
A pretty good cyclist pedaling pretty hard (200-250W) would take 4-5 hours to generate 1 kWh (worth around 10 cents).
If you were paying the cyclist (in the case of a gym, fortunately they are paying you), you're looking at $25+ per kWh. That makes solar look damn cheap!
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
a place to start is otherpower.com
also look at home power magazine.
I basically worked off of information I found online starting with otherpower.com and modified them for durability (Lots and lots of epoxy to protect things from weather) or ease of repair (no epoxy!)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The guys at otherpower.com do cool stuff. If you're wondering, "what's the point" with the hamster nightlight, you aren't seeing the whole picture. These guys have built, on their own, dozens of pieces of creative power generator equipment -- mostly out of wood!
Click around on the site a little bit (AFTER the Slashdotting subsides) and check out the other, real stuff they do. Like, making a 3 kilowatt wind turbine using a Volvo brake assembly, neodymium magnets and hand-wound copper coils, and hand-made wooden blades. I dream of having a workshop to do that kind of stuff.