Slashdot Mirror
OLPC Experiments With Cow-Powered Laptops
An anonymous reader writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows.
"We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal, in an October 21 e-mail posted to one of the group's discussion lists.
Sarwal and others are now finalizing the design of the cow-powered generator."
There is no way this is true.
There is no way they can get cows to power laptops, there is no way they would stay in their wheel.
Now, if they suggested a beowolf cluster of hamsters then I would believe it.
As it stands this article is just a load of bull.
liqbase
"This is a 5CP laptop, but if you could overclock it to 6CP."
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Whenever I see a herd of cows, they are either standing still eating, or walking to the milking shed to be milked. Getting one to walk on a conveyer belt with no useful purpose for the cow is not going to be easy. They might get a more consistent supply hooking up a dynamo to the cow's jaw, chewing is something they do a lot of.
I can see it now
Later that evening he is having a romantic chat with his girlfriend in the next village. Things get intense and the low power warning comes on her laptop. They are cut off as a great big cowpat soils his keyboard.
(I could have gone further, but hey, this is a family show, right?)
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
And here I was thinking the article was going to be about powering laptops with methane...
This guy's the limit!
Aren't these laptops for developing nations such as India? If so, there are *FAR* better ways to generate energy. I know that cows are work animals, but this is a terrible application. Throw up a few photovoltaics, batteries, and regulators, and you have an generator unit costing the same that does not waste your work/food animal.
Poor people using such animals tend to have a lot more common sense than we do. This is absolutely preposterous.
I was recently telling my colleagues (working at a wind turbine manufacturer) that we needn't worry that our turbines are 'not running' all over the globe. We'll just use cows and pulleys to generate some power.
We will also cultivate edible plants for biodiesel. Cow dung would be used as more biofuel. Of course, we will have to deduct the methane from their belches and flatulence for calculating carbon credits.
And for the customers who cannot afford large (MW class) wind turbines, we will offer them (along with kW class turbines) some goat-powered generation as well.
I have nurtured these ideas for almost a decade. I am so glad somebody is trying to put them to practice.
Oh, and cows / bulls have traditionally been yoked to grinding stones in oil mills, so no new stuff, really. Those stupid animals keep moving in the rut all day long. Their keepers tie bells to their necks and only check on them if the ringing stops.
Please, somebody ask why the animals don't just shake their head to make the bells ring!
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
It would be a trivial thing to gear up an oil press and drive a tiny generator to power a few laptops.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You know, I bet you could use a gnu just as well as a cow. Same electrical power, higher meta factor.
"You're using a gnu to power a GNU-powered device? My mind just exploded!"
After looking at the generator setup, this is something that would work. Generator from taxi's ready available cheep, a couple of front wheels from motorcycles also ready available. Ditto for 12 volt regulator and batteries. Driving farm animals around in a circle to run mills or other equipment for food processing has been done for centuries.
My question of this working is that I would expect the cow section to run probably 1 RPM. I would expect that the generator must turn somewhere above 400 rpm to put out a full 12 volts. (alternators usually above 700 rpm). So that is a pretty good gear ratio. Hence you see the double gear increase. Seems like it would be better to use a horse, which walks a bit faster, for several hours a day to charge the batteries instead of a cow.
Remember: To err is human, to moo is bovine.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
He is using a couple of bicycle wheels to increase the rpm to drive a truck alternator it looks like. Simple mechanism, easily maintained by the bicycle mechanics of an Indian village. This might find more applications too. Like charging their cell phones. A large part of rural India is still not on the national electric grid. Even the grid goes down sometimes in the rural areas. Most villages have this oil press powered by bullocks walking in a circular path (about 30 feet in diameter) dragging a yoke connected to a central pivot. They take a minute to finish a circuit. RPM=1. The gearing ratio from the picture appears to be 1: 60. (10x6). Not enough in my opinion to drive a standard truck alternator. Their efficiency peaks at around 1800 RPM. (I did a windmill for my undergrad project and I needed to gear it up to 1800 RPM to drive a truck alternator). Need to add another wheel set, not difficult to do.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The fact that the XO-1 was specifically designed to run on only 2-3 watts (using Geode at 0.8 watts and LCD-backlit / reflective display at 0.1 to 1 watts), compared to the 15-20 watts on a normal laptop or 100-200 watts on a desktop makes this sort of thing quite feasible.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Try these commands, too:
aptitude moo
aptitude -v moo
aptitude -vv moo
aptitude -vvv moo
aptitude -vvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvvv moo
Moo.
Peace sells, but who's buying?
To my knowledge, vegetarians don't eat meat while vegans won't eat meat, eggs, milk (yeah, I know milk is usually consumed by drinking, bug you can freeze and eat it.) and any other animal products. Therefore, not all vegetarians are vegans while all vegans are vegetarians.
Opposition against humans wearing animal fur, humans hurting animals, "anything that harms animals" as you say occurs within a similar subset of the human population, but is - as far as I know - not equal to veganism or vegetarianism.
You might be joking, but Heifer International isn't. They give animals to low income third-world areas, and when the animals mate, they pass some of the offspring on to other poor people. My grandparents donate a Flock of Ducks or Chicks from every grandchild in our family at Christmas.
My computers are super cow powered. See?
/------\/ /\---/\
$ apt-get moo
(__)
(oo)
/ | ||
*
~~ ~~
My blog
When you consider the use of a cow vs. the use of a small animal (like a hamster) you start having to understand how we turn physical motion into electricity.
A small animal like a hamster is really cute, but they don't produce much usable electrical power. They only run long enough to get a workout, and if they get tired... they stop running. Yes, someone actually turned their hamster's wheel into a generator. The hamster could light up LEDs, but that's nowhere near powering a laptop.
A cow, on the other hand, will produce excellent torque - if you can get it to walk - but then you waste some of that power changing the low-amp high-volt power into higher-amp lower-volt power. Remember - pumping water is essentially a high-torque/low-speed process, but most electrical generation is low-torque/high-speed. (But that's because most electrical generation is for AC power, not the charging of DC batteries. For DC charging, high-torque/low-RPM might work nicely.)
However, what they're probably going for here isn't the optimal conversion of animal power to electrical power. What they're probably trying to do is transform into electricity what they perceive to be widely available power.
Aren't they good enough? That'll stay true to geekdom.
I think it will need more cow bell. Give it more cow bell.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
The "cow power" is just solar power collected first by the grass (or whatever) the cow eats, then by the cow. By the time the cow pushes the dynamo, the efficiency of using the 1KW:m^2 that falls on the growing stuff is in the hundredths of a percent. Sunlight might not be "consistently strong", but it's evidently strong enough to grow whatever the cattle eat. What it needs is a battery, which the OLPC has.
Instead of a dynamo of belts and pulleys, which requires a lot of maintenance and isn't portable (like many nomads and people who herd cattle), how about they work on fermenting that grass for fuelcells? The cattle won't have to work as hard, so they won't need as much grass, which extra grass can power the OLPC. The dynamos they're proposing must be supplied elsewhere anyway, even from Fiat taxis, so why not get fuelcells instead? And why not use the demand for them to grow local fuelcell production industries?
And if fuelcells are too expensive or complicated, why not just some standard PV cells, feeding the OLPC batteries? A PV collector the size of a cattle pen could power several OLPCs.
--
make install -not war