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Wind-Up Notebook Computers
wtpooh writes "Wired has an article about a company developing a wind-up power source for computers. Apple is reportedly interested. " The company is also talking about its use in things like sub-notebooks. Man, if they made this (solar panels will probably be included), and if I got Iridium, I could go outside and still post. Seriously though, for people working the field, and less developed nations, things like this could really help the spread of computers.
In fact, they demoed an eMate with windup power at least a year ago. The radios built with this tech are available at a lot of mail order places now, though the politically coolest one was the one where they said up front that the profits on yuppie-sales were enough for them to send units 1-to-1 to Africa where they were actually needed..
to jump on this thing? The next iMac will ship ;)
with a big windup key in the back of the monitor!
Sorry. ;)
The point of this kind of technology is you can use it in places that don't have plugs, places like the African bush or the Amazon Delta. Combine this with Data-PCS or U-NII type networking or even Iridium (tm) and you can give the world to every school kid anywhere.
My notebook is powered by a gerbil.
My grama worked at the bank for 40 years before they had computers. She would spend the day typing on those old mechanical typewriters with the three inch keystroke.
It seems to me that you could make a laptop with those kind of keys and have a little generator hooked up to every key. Stick a little generator on the mouse ball and mouse buttons too. Of course them there mouse buttons would have to have three inches of movement too.
If they had thought of these generators in the days of the electric typewriter then they could have made typewriters that powered themselves just by pressing the keys!
My point (I know how dim the
that _might_ make the keys a little hard to press down. I dunno, they ought to test the idea out some, but seems to me it would make typing more difficult. And if there's anything that's irritating it's a crappy keyboard where you have to press hard for the keys to go down. nifty idea anyway.
I've been there today. It's cold and snowy. I'll just stay inside where it's nice and warm. :-)
Apple is the only company 'round these parts running a microchip (the PPC) low-power and small enough to _use_ a key-turn.
A winding laptop running off a Pentium |||... dunno, man, i dont think the gerbil's strong enough to provide that much power. You'd have to get, like, an oxen or something. Or one of those wheel things with all the paddles you put in a river.
I actually used to have to do that to get my ;)
first harddisk going in the morning after it started having troubles
My Newton 2100 in normal operation mode only sucks
57 mA.
So the technology EXISTS TODAY to:
1) surf the web
2) compose e-mail
3) post/read news
4) keep track of people/places/things/schedules etc la
AND keep it powered with a hand crank. Nothing new here.
The only NEW part about is the pissing match going on between
http://www.pelagius.com/AppleRecon/
and
http://www.appleInsider.com/
(The Newton has been used by more than a few out-in-the-middle-of no-where parties. one in the desert, the other climbing a monuntain. Both used satalite phones to relay communications back to the rest of us)
Wind-up laptops are not realistic with current technology. A typical laptop today is powered by a 4000 mA h, 12V accumulator for about 3 hours of work.
This means that it contains about 170kJ of energy. At a resistance of 5N (which is already pretty heavy-going for a crank), and a handle radius of 16cm, you need 34000 revolutions in order to load up your laptop. At two revolutions per second, you'll be working 5 hours at recharging your laptop. If you think that repetitive strain injury by computers is something to be wary of, you'll be surprised to what new heights this would lead.
This technique will be usable at best for devices with pocket organizer power requirements. But those should be working satisfactorily with a solar panel.
Now that there may be a way for them to get the power, how are they going to get the hardware itself? I wonder how this is going to affect the market for used PCs...
but the manual typewriter _did_ power itself just by pressing the keys...
Numbers are right. Resistance is about right. As the owner of a Freeplay radio, I can tell you the thing has nowhere near 100% conversion efficiency. You crank for about a minute for an hour's radio play time. There is no scale light and it probably doesn't even develop a watt of electrical output to the speaker. There is a slow grinding noise when the spring is cranking the generator. However, when the power is out in the Santa Cruz mountains - for days at a time - this radio is a good thing to have.
A hand cranked device *might* work if it had no spindles and a processor made to be efficient.
I suppose that's why Apple's interested :^P
Seriously, there's too many fscking "experts" on these damn forums...
If the grid really does go down on 1/1/Y2K, this would be the ultimate tool to have available.
Unfortunately it won't be available until 2000.
The Freeplay company is currently realing in $$$
hand over fist because people are stocking up on
the Freeplay radios before the "head for the hills". (Of course, I'm not sure how many
stations will be on the air if there is no power
grid)
I know a guy who's had a test Iridum phone for a couple months. He says the thing is awfull, on average only 1 out of every 9 calls is successfull (rings on the other end), and then the few successfull calls are very often dropped.
PPP with Iridium just ain't going to happen unless you have a LOT of patience.
I can be pedalling a bicycle in the country side
for navigation(satellite?) with mouse buttons designed to fit in handlegrips!! WOW
btw: the eMate was built for the rigors of elementary school students, has the same power draw as the Newton, and has a keyboard. It looks like a clamshell.
;) ;)
The thing's the Land Cruiser of 3rd world technology..
Now if only you could get a SA-1100 in one of those..
Yea, but the e-mate is MP130 SLOW.....and I'll take the extra power draw for the extra speed, and have a unit not quite as rugged.
Too bad that Steve Jobs shallow ego killed the Newton out of spite. It was only a year ago, RIP.
...and it runs BeOS.
First Post!
PowerPC is better performance.. the StrongARM market is not easy to enter, when you need to emulate FP. E.g. How to market Linux users?..
The e-mate isn't 4 years old. Newton Intelligence 2.1 (the core of the e-mate) isn't even 3 years old.
Not that this matters, for Cartoon Maker Steve Jobs killed the Newton out of spite.
For those of us here in Florida, it's a sunny 70F outside. Ahhh.
But here's what I use for power. One thing is, if you get tired of pedaling, you can put some vanes in the spokes and use the wheel as a windmill.
This Anonymous Coward is powered by a wind-up UPS.
If you want to see some nice profits:
Buy a jack-in-the-box.
Slap a "Designed for Windows98" sticker
on it.
Sell it for $2000.
Hell, make the computers not die on 1/1/00. All you have to do is move some bits around.
Twit.
IBM PPC might be easier to use because you don't need to emulate floating point. IBM PPC chips speeds equal Pentium III. SA is not designed to task switch. Operating system hacks for this is not impossible. Maybe a Caldera DRDOS port or less task switching in operating system might be usefull still I don't know of any window system that doesn't task switch alot :-(
Beef, I've been reading your postings for a couple of days now... You are some kind of computer AI project, right?
your post kinda makes it unclear what you mean...
will it make things better for people from the
industrialized world who work there? or will
it make things better for the people who live there? id wager many people would find this distinction sort of important.
I've always wondered about this. Why exactly is it that human beings can run for days on a tiny amount of food, and yet at the same time we apparantly aren't even capable of say, lighting a lightbulb. I mean, I can throw my entire body into the air with ease, move my body around all over the place by walking and running, which extremely inefficient methods, and I am constantly running a computing device that's a lot more complex than any computer chip. So, why is it that any electrical device that can even come close to that sort of thing needs a half a ton of batteries, not carried onboard, to even come close to lasting as long as a human being can?
I suppose what I'm asking is: where are our super-robots, our aircars? We were supposed to be living in a technological paradise, but can you show me one single death ray?
I Dont have any hard data, but it wouldnt take that much power to really power a laptop... Power demand will vary depending on how you use it. In a regular laptop there is a lot of power requirements. But keep in mind that the P1 portable is designed to consume as little power as possible...the processor however isnt a low power verision, it's the same one found in all G3 based mac's... I read somewhere that cranking it for 45 seconds would give you power for 45 mintues... now only if we could attach a gear converter to that thing.. you could crank for umm 15 seconds and power it for like 2 hours... of course, combined with a lot of effort....
Is there a coverage map for compatible cellulars? I'm psyched to try GSM, if it works all over.
Some of us don't spend much time ``surfing''; we use our network connections mostly for telnet, irc, and other minimal-bandwidth but very useful services. :)
- RF (dfelker@cnu.edu)
Any suggestions for parts? Here's what I'm looking for:
I've been trying to get this thing put together for over a year now, and I'm still in the planning stages (although I have found some nice places to get hardware), so I'd really appreciate any suggestions/help I can get. While I'll check for replies here, it's probably easier to just email me if you want to discuss the project, since no one looks at old slashdot articles anyway after a few days...
- RF (dfelker@cnu.edu)
As far as I can see, my laptop has a nice connector for the external power supply.
It expects something like 12-16V DC from this source. How about a simple, external Windup-Power-Supply, producing the power needed, maybe even with a select-switch just like the multi-purpose-socket-PSUs for 3-12V DC devices?
Anyone remember the comic strip, "On the Fastrack" by Bill Holbrook?
The employees in the comic strip had wind-up terminals on their desks (because their boss was too cheap to buy better ones!)
Your "tiny" amount of food contain lots of chemical energy, the dry part can be compared with gasoline, the power-weight ratio for dry food is probably better than a battery.
Muscles use the food power in an efficient way, but don't make much power compared to their weight. That's why you last so long.
A robot as weak as a human would work just fine if it could "eat" as often as you do, and work no harder than you. The energy is not the problem when building such a thing.
Where's that?
If Intel keeps cranking up power consumption the way they have in the past, you'd need to be the Man of Steel to crank out enough power for a laptop based on the Mobile Pentium III. I suspect that such laptops will either a) have a battery life of 5 minutes, or b) require an extra wheeled cart for the battery, or c) require serious workouts in the gym in order to carry around :-).
But seriously -- is anybody else as disturbed as me about so-called "laptops" that need ten-pound batteries to give more than 45 minutes of battery life, and that will scorch your lap (from the heat) if you are ever silly enough to set it there?
I was seriously hoping Corel would come out with a Netwinder-based Linux laptop. 15 watts of power consumption. Could power that sucker off of a couple of AA batteries! Alas, does not appear to be in the cards...
-- Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Linux already has perfectly good FP emulation libraries so that's not a problem.
:-(. But if they can get the K6-3 and K7 shipping in quantity for a decent price, with a low-power laptop version, this might be acceptable.
Some problems I see with StrongArm:
1) PCMCIA support. PCMCIA support is built into most laptop chipsets, but there are no laptop chipsets aimed at the StrongArm.
2) Chipset support, period. In today's world of high-density FPGA's that's not as big a deal as it used to be, especially with a chip like the StrongArm that has a very easy-to-handle bus spec, but it still represents a design hurdle (though obviously one that Corel succeeded at jumping through).
3) Software. This is the biggy. There isn't a blessed thing for the StrongArm except whatever Corel had put out. Going with the PPC you can just load LinuxPPC on it and have it work, going with the StrongArm you're stuck with making your own distribution, basically.
Lest we forget, there are also some other chips out there. There are some low-power-consumption MIPS chips, for example (the MIPS chips are often used in laser printers and such). The PPC has better power consumption than the Mobile Pentium II, and similar performance, but definitely does not sip like the StrongArm. Unfortunately the only laptop chipset for the PPC appears to be Apple's, which isn't available to mere mortals (I'd take their laptops if they'd sell'em to us without MacOS, but that does not seem to be in the cards).
The wildcard is AMD. I've played with a couple of AMD-based laptops and they're better than the Intel on the power consumption front, but their floating point performance really sucks
But for low power consumption, NOTHING beats the StrongArm!
-- Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
My sister in law has had a wind up radio for almost 3 years now. This technology isn't new, unless they boosted the power. Something like this probably wouldn't drive an x86 chip anyway. Probably only the PPC and StrongARM.
Posted by Akira410:
Akira runs around the corner preparing to fire a rocket at his opponent. An alarm sounds:
Akira: Wait! Gotta wind up my laptop!
BadGuy: Hah, yeah right! Eat my rocket!
*BLEH*
Heheh =) Anyways
Posted by Akira410:
...
Mine used to be powered by a gerbil
*sighs sadly*
Gee, what a novel idea! ;>
Not as much as earlier in the week, but it was down to -12... Jeez. I'd rather stay in and hack too when it's like THAT...
Umm... That's a great David Bowie album... Beyond that... Umm... I dunno.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
If your bike had a windshield like motorbikes and cars, a few mirror tricks could make the screen float in front of you without using technology currently beyond our capabilities.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The idea is that the crank gives you a power source when you can't get to an outlet and your batteries are low. That makes it very useful in educational markets, where they can't provide an outlet in every desk. Also, it'd be good for journalists out in the field, where ready power isn't always accessible. This thing actually could have a lot of uses.
See above. I love mine. Not worried at all about Y2K! :-)
I've heard about these wind-up generators before, and my first thought was that they'd be great for notebooks. I've been eagerly awaiting someone to make this move, and I can't wait to get my hands on one. Could you imagine using that with a wireless modem? You could be hiking in the hills with your Toshiba Satellite, and telecommute to work, or do whatever. Sure, you'd have to crank it a lot, but we all need to work out. Maybe someone will make a pedal-version, so you can crank it more easily? Just sit in the woods, occassionally winding up your external notebook powersource with your feet. Pretty cool stuff.
Not computers, radios. News and information are useful to everyone. A little technology over there may just help that continent to stabilize a bit, so that people can make their lives better.
Surely this can't be good for your wrists, eh? ;-)
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
This is old new. The technology has worked with eMates for about four years now - the Newton range are very good at dealing with crappy power supplies, and the ARM7 based versions especially use very little power. Tom (?) Baliss (the guy who invented the radios) and someone from Apple knocked up the prototype at a conference when they first met.
Since then the main obstacle has been storing more power in the spring. It looks like they have not met with much success and are looking for more venture capital. I reckon we might one day see palmtops powered like this (and I would use one), but I doubt they'll ever hold enough power to power a laptop.
Oh, yes. Technology leads to stability: why, the 20th century is just FULL of examples! Why, the US is just a whole lot of people getting along nicely because they have TV and radio!
In fact, the fascist movements of the early 20th century were largely made possible by radio broadcast, and the Rwandan massacres were coordinated by radio, with on-air demagogues exhorting Hutus to rise up against Tutsis.
I like that idea. It's like those watches that get charged just by your movement. I mean, you can power it without doing much extra work.
What about using some sort of piezo (sp?) electronics device to generate the power? I think that is what they use for those self powering watches, and K2 makes a ski that has a circuit in it... (bunch of marketing hype) It supposedly uses the circuit to transform vibration into electrical energy which lights a little LED on the ski.. supposed to help with vibration damping.. but the circuit is really small... I'ld buy a self powering liberetto that you never had to plug in! :)
Iridium is voice system. Its limited to a 2400 connection. Pushing data over that network has got to hurt.
But on a regular G3 laptop? Get outta here!
Amy
---- My Design, Code, Ruby on Rails blog: http://www.slash7.com/
Here's the CNN article from 4/6/97, describing the technology, and here's the direct link to the .mov that shows the eMate being powered by it.
Never refuse a breath mint.
A buddy of mine spent 3 months in Fiji about six years ago - he took his laptop and solar panels. Didn't have good comms, but that's not really what this article is about.
It's nice that someone is finally packaging the technology - certainly packaging and marketing are more than half the battle - but hyping it as something revolutionary is a bit over the top, no?
or am I just having really wicked deja-vu... I have been up doing work all night, but I don't *think* I've gone so much crazier...
I often wonder about that sort of thing... is it really help, or continued imperialism? Very fuzzy distinction. Sometimes I think that study abroad programs are good, other times I wonder if it only strengthens western influence....
Looking at the road is no problem with retinal projection using 3 low power laser beams (RGB).
The image will simply be superimposed on the field of view =)
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
...probably because, they demoed the e-Mate version (article mentions it) just over a year ago.
--The more you know, the less you know.
like the topic says.
it's a great idea - the newton and emate have really low power requirements, and the new C1 portable that apple is working on is (i guess) gonna be real similar to the emate in structure, with even simpler and cooler motherboard components.
it'll never work on intel equipment, but man...what i wouldn't give for a g3 with a crank.
vector
and it works just like any normal radio. Except you have to wind it up first. You crank it 60 times to wind up the spring, and it's good for about an hour. I'd imagine that a laptop with CPU/hard drive/LCD screen would take a more powerful spring, but it should be do-able.
How hard could it be? All you have to do is move some electrons around.
The obligatory next step would be methane powered. Eat that chili!!!
-- Rob
Check out Largest recipe database on the web.
i recall listening to a Baygen interview and he was talking about using the generator in alternate ways of converting potential energy to kinetic energy: instead of a windup spring, a person could lift buckets of sand high overhead (like from trees). then over the course of the next several days, the rope holding the bucket unwinds powering the Baygen generator
That is a _really_ cool idea, but it seems like it would set back the laptop's "miniaturization" process quite a bit. I'm not a ME, but I'd still have to think that adding that sort of mechanism --and making it effective-- to a laptop would really bulk it up.
---
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
The flight attendent said I'm no longer allowed to leave my seat.
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
They don't need computers in Africa. They wouldn't know what to do with them. Probably they'd use them to crack a nut, or something.
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
Can I get that with bacon?
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
Socity has become so lazy and is getting more lazy as the days go on... I don't think this would catch on to well. Why crank it, when you can just plug it in.. That's the philosphy no adays.. But I wouldn't mind.. I think it would be good exercise!!
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Yeah, anyway, I'm sure the amount of cranking one would have to do is negligible, considering the benefit of it.
If memory serves, during an interview with BBC's 'Tomorrow's World', Trevor Bayliss (inventor of the clockwork radio) declared an intent to produce a clockwork computer. Trevor had a huge struggle before anyone took his radio seriously. He didn't get recognition until Tomorrow's World broadcast the story. Now, his radio is manufactured in South Africa, by the South Africans, (primarily) for the South Africans.
FWIW, I don't think that he had the Pentium chip in mind for his proposed computer. After all, the Psion PDAs can go weeks or months on just one set of alkalines. Is it unreasonable to expect a clockwork computer to run for an hour or two on a single wind?
Trevor already has the technology to power such a machine. To my mind, all that remains is to obtain the funding
//shady
Why not make a little pad you could sit on that would power your computer by heat and/or piezo electric crystals that would get power just from shifting your weight.
Or how about a little foot pedal you pump? That could be pretty compact.
Just to point out that the wind-up radio was invented by Trevor Bayliss. He lives on Eel Pie Island in Twickenham (south west London, and about half a mile from where I live!).
I have read discussion of various wind-up equipment some time ago in a Yachting magazine. A boat is a good example of a place where one does not want to be reliant on batteries for electrical power. A wind-up emergency radio is a Very Good Idea. Also, being able to wind up the computer used for navigation is good.
As to power, perhaps laptop vendors need to think again about cramming vast power into laptops. Current batteries would run a typical laptop from 5 years ago for ages.
Well, you *could* use Iridium if it actually worked...
Web surfing at 2400bps ain't much fun.
You dont need an iridium phone to be online almost everywhere in the world. My D2-cellular is
reachable in over 110 countries. They just need to have a compatible GSM-Network. Unfortunately the US decided to use other frequencies for their cellular system than almost every other country worldwide...
So I think Iridium will die quite fast... and what I read about sold iridium phones (ca. 3000 instead of over 10000 planned) makes me quite sure of this...
Geez, even more trash in Orbit...