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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
I guess this article should really be under "It's funny. Laugh.". Using animals' movement to power a nightlight (which presumably has to be on for upwards of 10 hours a day) is about as good an idea as teens4christ. Still, it's a neat way to teach kids about dynamos and the like, I'll grant them that! Anything that gets kids interested in science can only be a good thing.
power your website while it's being slashdotted.
Man has finally harnessed the power of animals. Soon we will be able to bring animals to other fields, replacing farm equipment and automobiles.
Let's not forget that one can hate his government, but love his country.
String a baked ham to the thing and see if she can light up Chicago.
Thankyou, I'll be here all week. Try the fish.
Skippy dies due to slashdotting a site with 14 pictures of him... Now who is going to power the annoyingly loud little nightlight?
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
I heard a theory once about getting a gym to power their lights from the people in the gym. The idea was to hook up all the bikes to a generator. I think its a good idea.
From ALBUQUERQUE, you say?
ALBUQUERQUE (n.)
A shapeless squiggle which is utterly unlike your normal signature, but which is, nevertheless, all you are able to produce when asked formally to identify yourself. Muslims, whose religion forbids the making of graven images, use albuquerques to decorate their towels, menu cards and pyjamas.
I did something similar for a wind generator for a futuristic class (in 1977, no less). One of the designs had an inner and an outer counter-rotating blades which later struck me as too complex. But I was thinking that a design with the magnets at the outer edges made a lot of sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A desert covered in hordes hamster wheels, all providing power to the Western U.S.
We can hire Mexican immigrants to change the wood shavings!
'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?'
If it thinks it's being chased by Richard Gere, then yes, it probably can.
Would it work with badgers?
The people at the Badger Institute Of Devon, England have been conducting experiments and have come to the conclusion that yes, badgers can generate electricity while running in a wheel, if two other conditions are met; those involving mushrooms and a snake. Oh yes, it's a snake.
Magical Trevor, the head of the department, was unavailable for further comment.
I've been using my human power to get to the Internet during power outages
Does running down the street shouting "HELP! Does anyone have 'net access at the moment? I need the interweb!" really count?
Now that we can be replaced with hamsters, why are the machines going to keep us around? I imagine they'll get a great ROI by ditching the human based Matrix in favor of a less complex one designed to simulate a glass cage with tubing in some 5th grader's bedroom.
Google cache here
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Hah. This reminds me of my favourite power source, children. Everybody knows that kids have an infinite supply of energy. Now, if kindergartens had toys that absorbs this energy from the children in their games, the kindergartens can actually become very lucrative power plants, paying the parents to have their kids there. Hyperactive kids are of course the ideal ;-)
_ /Bjorn.
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 makes me wonder how much a human would produce in a big wheel or several humans in a long wheel.
A moderately-trained human being can generate about 100 watts for several hours (in addition to the other 100 watts needed for the body to live). Top long-distance athletes (cycling, running) can go up to around 400 watts, but only for a limited amount of time (less than 1 hour). Peak power is of course higher (1 KW for a few seconds?).
How many of these would be required to power a time machine?
-Stephen
Come Pinky! We must prepare for tomorrow night! Why? What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain? The same thing we do every night, Pinky... Try to power the norhteastern seaboard!!!
Quote: "To save energy, it would make sense to utilise the senselessly relentless pedestrian marathon tendencies of the domestic hamster (fatface domesticus). ..."
loc. cit.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
So I'm curious. I run/jog a bit, and if I use the gym they have machines that waste electricity just to make me run on the spot.
If we were to get a human-sized hamster wheel, how much energy could I *generate* on it doing a, say, 30 min hard run every morning?
If everyone did this, would it have an impact on our electricity usage in the homes - and provide an incentive for overweight people to jog (not only lose weight, but save money on electricity bills). Not only this, but it's good to jog on a surface which has your footfall a little higher than the point your foot leaves the ground (as a wheel would) because it lessens impact fatigue on your ankles and particularly knees.
I used to have a 1.5V analogue quartz wall clock that was powered by a Crystal Set. With a 10m antenna, I could pull in enough power to run the thing 24/7.
Other things, such as LEDs and small motors, used to get hooked up to the set too.
I also found a 1930s radio speaker in a junk shop - it was in a walnut case and included a multi-tapped transformer to give the speaker numerous effective impedances from 3.4 Ohms all the way up to 2K Ohms. Set on 2K Ohms, the crystal set was easily as loud as a small battery-powered AM radio.
AT&ROFLMAO
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?
Can I get these fricken hamsters with self powered fricken laser beams on their fricken heads?
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."
Get a condom that is strong enough, and put hamster in it. And there's your hamster powered vibrator, when, one hamster stops giving you the vibes change hamster.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
a Untrained human can produce easily 25-40 watts for several hours on a recumbent pedal generator. we did this last Field day. 5 Ham radio operators (usually fat guys) on home made recumbent pedal generators made enough electricity by leisurely pedaling to power all the radios used for around the world contacts for that 24 hours. some of the radios had a 100Watt power output and there certianly were more than 4 radios working at a time.
the key is power -> battery bank -> devices. when the radios are recieving they draw very little so the power you generate is stored for that high power intermittent draw.
none of us were atheletes in any way shape or form, and it was not difficult for any of us to do a 2 hour stint on the generators because of thwe recumbent design.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Now if only we had a way to just plug people directly into the power grid....
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
I was at the Glastonbury Festival this summer, one of the UK's biggest summer festivals which gets crammed with 150,000 hippies every year.
In one of the tents, a exercise bike was rigged up to a sound system (I assume with a resevoir to hold the power gained.) The idea being that the dance tent could be self sustained, green and economical enough to provide it's own electricity for the music, lights and bar equipment.
It worked! However not many people want to beast themselves on a bike/treadmill for 45 mins to listen to music and have a nice pint of beer.
Quite unique for the Glastonbury festival anyway I thought!
Mmmmmmm beer.
Ball park figure, if you're in really good shape and put a serious workout into it you may be able to run a bicycle-generator at 150 watts for a half hour.
That's 0.075 kilowatt-hours of power from your half-hour workout. Probably less than one cent worth of electricity (depending on your local electric prices).
Even if you had an entire gym full of people running them continuously the value of electricity produced is neglegible, and the extra hardware and maintanence costs to add generators and wiring to the equipment makes it a losing proposition.
You'd be better off digging ditches at minimum wage and using the money to buy solar cells or a wind turbine or to simply pay someone to pump oil out of the ground and burn it.
On the other hand, I guess a gym could set it up as a motivational gimmick. Running the lights and what-not off of "excercise power" would actually be more expensive, but maybe you can draw and hold costomers with the gimmick. Having the exercise machines display watts of power and total watt-hours for the session might give customers more focus and goals in their workout. And they get to feel they are being enviornmentally "green", chuckle.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Why does this sound like a pre-cursor to the matrix or something?
=)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sorry! The mutiple hampster wont power much beyond the LED. Dexter tried it with 100 and no go! Would not recharg his lab!
Even if you use a larger creature like a water buffalo like Gyro Grearloos did in an underdevelop country. It still takes way too many men to shove them up and down the ramp to generate power.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Woah, and Keanu Reeves wakes up from the Matrix and discovers that he's a hamster! I knew it, and it explains so many things about him!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
One hamster may not be much, but imagine a building full of hamsters each running on its own wheel! And for those peak usage periods just throw in a cat to the mix.
from Budweiser where you had a rodent running in a wheel with a Budweiser in front of it. Some guy passes by and decides to take the beer. At that exact moment, the rodent stops running and all of New York light's turn off. So the guy decides to put it back in front of the wheel and the rodent starts running again, turning the lights of the city back on.
Captured the mouse in my room.
Told him to run fast enough to power my night light.
He didn't run fast enough to make enough light for me to see to feed him so he didn't have enough energy to run fast enough to...
Result: dead mouse. No night light.
Now I can't see to clean up the dead mouse.
Room smells bad.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A world-class bike sprinter can generate 1.9 KW (almost 3 horsepower!) for a few seconds.
Some time ago I got a flat tire, and was constantly blown back by the windforce of passing trucks. The thought occurred to me, that all that energy goes to waste despite being very predictable and fairly ubiquitous accross our country. I'd like to see someone invent a very disposable, mass-producable, cheap windmill, maybe as big as a pinwheel, that we can use to cover the center medians of our highways and possibly power at LEAST all the traffic lights.
This article looks like the efficiencies are increasing.. now to make it fractions of a penny to produce.
-g
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.
http://www.techspot.com/gallery/showphoto.php/phot o/433 :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).