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Typing Recharges Laptops?
TwoSticks writes "Compaq patents a keyboard that captures your kinetic energy. Magnets and coils on each key charge a small battery to augment the big one in your laptop. Standard NYTimes deal: requires free registration. "
I'm a bit suspicious but it looks interesting. It might give
me an incentive to fix typos anyway ;)
Anybody remember their April Fools Day Page with the mouse that recharged the laptop's battery? That little hoax must have been based off some people joking around about this keyboard.
Nah, I could type all day on a laptop, and it would produce maybe an extra second's worth of life. The screen simply consumes too much energy.
Not really, considering my computer sits next to my big honkin' non-shielded speakers, i've got bigger stuff to worry about :>
slashdot could run a few crays just by fixing all typos with this keyboard.
...making the backspace key have a huge ergometric tax on it...
I don't know which would win:
better spllling, but lower battery life
or
better spelling and longer batter life
(thinking about it)
Humans are fundamentally lazy (both physically and mentally), so the probable outcome would be poor spelling and lower battery life.
I still think those spring powered battery replacements could be built into a laptop's main clamshell hinge. Gear that bitch up and put a massive fscking spring in for both opening and closing and you could possibly generate enough power to run the average PowerPC type laptop processor for an hour or more.
Of course, designing a laptop form-factor mechanism to generate, channel and store that much kenetic energy might bring on an entirely new nitch to consumer tourt law.
Those dudes at compaq have *WAY* too much time on their hands (so to speak).
Ah, I think I know how it works:
There is a 10 Kg depleted U flywheel in the case,
and pushing the keys clicks a silent drive chain
over a little cog, and there's this gear train, and a ratchet, and it keeps the flywheel spinning,
if you can type over 60 wpm.
April Phil
So who is this guy at COMPAC? Just shows that there are more ways than code to hack your way into the NYTimes. If there was a pad on the front of your monitor, hooked to a little generator, you could keep a desktop running by banging your head against the pad, while waiting for reboots. Take it and run with it - the patent's yours.
You know you said:
"I wonder how efficient this is, what's the ratio of energy gained from magents to the amount of energy required to move your finger to depress the button?"
And (not taking any of this topic too seriously), considering the amount of energy stored versus the energy expended on your keyboard as it is is 0 (zero), anything would be better than nothing right???
=)
-Ken
A few hundred magnets in close proximity to the hard disk... I wonder if these people stick their boot floppies to the refrigerator with magnets so they can always find them when they need them. Yes, it sounds like a joke to me...
"Compaq Australia did something like this for April Fools day, a mouse with a 'super conducting generator' in it which charged your battery as you moved it. Even included a little Formula 1 game to help you get the idea." They also ran this add in the New Zealand Herald at the time. Front and 7th pages if I remember right. Rather pointless, considering all the April Fools day jokes there are in the newspapers on April 1st.
cyberpunks11 / punks
:( Go GNU with a tech that cool man!
Hope they don't do something stupid like put a GUI OS on there where users don't use the mouse as much. They should put a CL dominate OS on there to take advantage of it's full potential.
And now the dude how inveted it gave his patent upto compaq
Duh. Laptops are only used by executives
to run powerpoint.
How 'bout a mini steam engine generator for
laptops that burns bullshit as its heat source?
-Kevin
hey fool DBC means Don't Bother Clicking
So while we're at the job of producing energy...why not one up Compaq...
;P
:) )
I propose a keyboard in which the keys produce energy off the heat of your fingers. Don't even have to type, just lay your fingers on the keys and waaalaaah...behold energy.
You could even turn up the thermostat...and boom...computer is powered..and on those hot days at the beach...We could all be walking power plants.
Even better, playing some 4 player game on the same computer (Tron-like)...and who kjnows...the Electric company may have to pay you. hehehe
Rashad
( yeah I know I should sign up....but my keyboard doesn't produce energy, so it's wasted typing
First of all, what makes everyone thing that adding these microgenerators will make the keys harder to hit? The primary resistance will still com from the spring. Pass a magnet through a copper coil. Do you feel any resistance? Attach a sensitive voltmeter to the ends of the coil. The voltage should jump a bit. The only reason manual generators had any resistance, was a gearing system to effectively multiply the rotations of the magnets in the coils, enabling a usable amount of energy to be received. You could have the same effect without the gears, only you would have to spin the motors much faster.
On another note, since when does a laptop consume the same amount of energy as a destop. Manufacturers make low power versions of their processors for laptops.
I keep reading about putting a generator in a mouse. This may be fine for trackball mice on a laptop (seems to be fading out). Destop computers do not use batteries! (except for the one that keeps the time) The energy gain would be negligible compared to a keyboard.
If you want to determin how much power is generated by each keystroke, it will be based upon the velocity of the magnet passing through the coil, the stroke of the magnet, the reistance of the wire in the coil, and the number of turns (and probably the diameter.) Add to that the inefficiency of the component that injects the energy back into the system, and an average number of keystrokes per hour. With all that you should end up with an idea of how much help a really expensive keyboard will be.
Even with an increase of 5% on a 4 hour battery that is still 12 minutes...
Personally I think it is a good idea, perhaps a bit before it time, but a good idea for future laptops (ones with lower power consumption and higher efficiency.)
Okay okay...even better idea...especially for PDAs...have a pendulum inside, like how a swiss watch works...that way it charges with just the sway of your hips...
is this considered a misuse of brain power?
Rashad
Hey you could leave it on forever, just get one of those drinking birds to keep hitting the space bar while you go to eat, sleep, etc. It would defeat the screensaver, but are those really necessary for laptop screens?
If so hack xlock to only execpt alt-ctrl-some funky key to disable the screen saver, then the bird would work.
Drinking birds rule
Hrm, if he was in the delvopment department I guess it would be compaq property.
But say you a programer working for xyz company delevoping custom cgi scripts, if on your own time code a windows manager or device driver or some program that has nothing to do with what your paid for and developed on a offsite place under personal hours, would it still be legal for a company to take the software, copyright it under any license they seen fit?
Would it have to be specified directly in the contract it's self? If it wasn't in the contact agreement could they still steal (err, take) the code from the programer?
What if it was in the contact, the company wanted to take the program, what legal crap would the programer face if he denied to give the code, or "forgot" the key he used to encrypt all the code?
perhaps nt's ctl-alt-delete?
you play pacman with a mouse???
I have tried to damage modern (3.5 in.) floppy disks with standard strength refrigerator magnets, it doesn't work, even prolonged direct contact with the disk itself does nothing. They are too well built. I doubt the magnets inside this keyboard thing are as strong as refrigerator magnets and they would be at least a key's width away at all times.
Regenerative breaking is completely different. A significant amount of energy is stored up in a moving car. In fact, without friction and other losses, the energy would be the same amount put into the car.
Here's an idea, why not extract some energy off of the heat differential between the massively hot pentium cpu's and the 'outside world'? Just think of the massive amounts of untapped energy being wasted...
Mike G.
The URL is:
R eleases/ViewRelease.asp?id=535
http://www.compaq.com.au/aboutus/newsroom/Press
And since Bill Gates rocks himself like an autistic child, we could put him in a harness and power a large portion of the Internet.
whats up with all these comments scored 0?
these are pretty funny and good if i may say so myself.
better than some of the other so called "funny" comments which got scored better.
How about putting us all in vats where our residual body heat can power an entire industrial civilization? Data jacks can be plugged into our brainstems, providing us with entertainment.
Nah.... it'll never fly.
Does Rolex have a kintetic system too? I though only Seiko had it.
Umm....because the energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere would be the rotation of the disk. The disk would get harder to turn and would therefore require a greater increase in the amount of energy needed to turn it than the energy created by the little generator. Duh.
Harnesing ambient EM seems fine to me, but i would recommend against setting up nowadays something akin to tesla's world power system. There is a good chance that it would mess up just about every piece of grounded electronics on the planet. That would be bad.
:)
Gotta go, I'm off to offer animal sacrifices at the alter of the Wardenclyffe.
Psy-Kosh joeyk19(getthisspamblockoutofhere)@idt.net
Yes, there was an April 1st mouse spoof. It was pretty much the same idea except it harnesed the power of the mouse wheel, very silly stuff :-).
I suspect Adrian Crisan never did his sums and Compaq in their haste to file patents gave him a big fat bonus without checking the numbers on the back on an envelope. Maybe within the next 17 years computers will consume less power and the I.P. will be worth something but if this happens a fairly small battery will last for a very long time and in anycase it seems to buck the current trend.
Adrian Crisan, mad fool of an inventor or cynical bonus collecting corporate rebel?
Cheers,
NO YOU GROW UP. I AM NOT A FUCKING TROLL. NEVER, EVER CALL ME A FUCKING *TROLL*
HI TROLL
How about compaq make something where u stick a tube up your ass, and when you fart, it burns in a chamber and heats some water which generates steam and drives a turbine which charges the battery!
Get real! I't would be more effecient to just carry another battery round.
Still, i like the jerbil idea, maybe a rat would give more power though.
> The amount of energy that would be created is not worth the effort. After 1250 hours of typing you have save ONE HOUR! YEA!
;-)
Doesn't sound any worse than the Free Gift offers you get from credit card companies
http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/srchnum.htm
Search for that patent num... It's actually valid.
A keyboard power generator provides a plurality of keys with one or more magnets mounted thereon. Additionally, a plurality of coils are mounted on both ends of the magnet such that, when the user is typing, the magnet traverses the coils. The movement of the magnet over the coils causes a current to be generated. In one embodiment, one magnet is mounted per key on the keyboard. In a second embodiment, a plurality of magnets are mounted per key to enhance the power generation capability of the keyboard. The currents generated collectively by the keys are provided to a charge pump which multiplies the voltage to achieve a level greater than the voltage level of the battery to be charged. The multiplied voltage is provided to a charging circuitry such as a trickle charger to recharge the battery. In this manner, the more information entered by the user, the more electricity is generated by the keyboard power generator. The energy provided by the keyboard of the present invention can be used to lengthen the operating period of the portable computer, or alternative, can be used to reduce the size of the primary battery so as to result in a lighter portable computer.
This keyboard sounds like it would wear out your hands pretty quickly. You have to expend enery to generate electricty, and I doubt you are going to get much energy from a keyboard unless you make they keys very hard to press (or have very long tavel on each key). On a standard laptop keyboard (with almost no travel) I doubt you are going to get more than a few seconds of battery life out of your keystrokes, even if you are typing a huge amount of text all the time.
Anybody remember those generator powered headlights on bikes? Remember how hard it was to pedal whenever you tried to use it?
Wasn't there an April fools joke similar to this this year?
I read the internet for the articles.
Posted by Musical Saw Geek:
I'm sure this was one of John Kennedy and Nick Veitch's spoof news items in the old magazine Amiga Computing. There was another one that had a velocity-sensitive keyboard that gave you caps if you hit it harder...
I'll agree with this and remind people who might be worried that this is an underestimate that 5 Newtons is about 1 lb of force. It's a cool idea, but even when you're clattering along at 60wpm, this is only .06 W while you're typing; and I know that I personally don't spend a lot of time typing a lot at a laptop, I use it more for browsing reports than writing them. All my serious typing is done on a real keyboard, usually attatched to a desktop.
Assuming 5N per key with a key course length of 2mm you get, as you stated, .01J per keypress. Now lets assume that the user types 4 strokes per second constantly (50 wpm) for an hour. That would give us .01J/stroke * 4stroke/s * 360s = 144J of power to the battery. Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power, for an hour of typing this would give us 144/50 = 2s.
Remember all these parts are lossless components bought at your local theoretical physics store, if you have normal parts you have to subtract for battery and transfer loss.
asinus sum et eo superbio
asinus sum et eo superbio
in omnibus veritas
--
I don't know if anyone's doing it commercially, but another way to get electrical energy from a keyboard would be to use a piezoelectric polymer film such as PVDF (see http://www.measspec.com/piezo_film.htm). This would be non-magnetic, lightweight, and structurally quite similar to existing membrane-switch keyboards.
I don't think any finger-powered transducer can generate enough power to even put a dent in the consumption of a Pentium-II laptop, but it might help with a Palm Pilot or other micro-power device.
My guess is that the idea is being implemented with a goal NOT to be the sole source of charging power for the battery (otherwise why have a battery at all?), but rather to stretch the amount of time the battery can power the notebook on a single charge. This would be similar to the idea of regenerative braking in electric vehicles.
;-)
This does make the mind wander with all kinds of other possibilities. What about capturing the energy of ambient sound waves? Then the swearing and cursing prompted by the Blue Screen Of Death could actually be put to constructive use.
Think of it as more of a "trickle-charge" -- not enough to fully power your laptop, but enough to delay changing batteries. By how much, I dunno -- Using the POOMA method, I'd guess on the order of 15-30 minutes from a few hours of typing.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
About a forth of the way down this page (sorry, no cid link)...
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Anyone else get nervous with magnets around storage media? All those magnets for each key sounds scary to me!
Probably not big enough to harm anything, though...
- George
That's Hall Effect. Guy named Hall discovered/invented it. The HAL effect is when your computer resolves programming conflicts by terminating the users.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
you can view the patent here
U S05911529__
http://www.patents.ibm.com/cgi-bin/viewpat.cmd/
- MbM
- MbM
It's actually slightly better than that. All of the speed controls these days use "regenerative braking" where the force for slowing down is created by drawing current from the motor. Pretty neat little system, the harder you brake the more charging you get, but only up to a point (when the wheels lock).
My
Now I just need to turn the repeat rate WAY up and put a book on the space bar before going to sleep. Voila: All the energy I could ever need. :)
This is another nifty marketing idea to take in people who can't do math (someone posted energy calculation below) -*but*- It does remind me of a sketch from an 'ol 2nd city TV show about 'gadgets of the future' with someone in space age clothes typing on an old Royal mechanical typewrite while the voice over says, "In the future, typing apparatus will derive energy directly from your fingertips, allowing one to create documents w/o the need for bulky and cumbersome electronic equipment" (editing is a bitch tho).
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Getting back towards the subject, has anybody used one of those batteryless torches where you squeeze the handle to light them up?
I've got one, and it's much more annoying than a Radio/Torch with Solar and Dynamo charging of internal battery.
I also have about 8 Swatch "Autoquarz" watches (like the Seiko Kinetic) and a Solar Swatch. I have too many Autoquarzes to keep them all running, but I can mostly keep the Solar running just by leaving it somewhere that gets a little sun.
On the other hand, I had a solar-only radio and had a lot of problems keeping that charged - being able to wind my new radio is a major advantage.
I guess I'm saying that we should have as many ways to power things as we can think of, so keep the kinetic powering of laptops going, but also work on embedding solar panels into the lid.
Now if Jade Mountain would just help me work out which solar kit I need for my Sharp Actius...
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
Sure. This is actually pretty easy.
Energy per keystroke is force * distance, or 0.01 J. Keystrokes per second times energy per keystroke gives energy per second (or power), which is 0.1 W.
So, it doesn't look like this is viable unless we have *really* low power notebooks
Just wondering. :)
Sorry, I thought I dropped enough clues. Heh.
Igor Kreturs pronounced: I gore creatures. Ok, so maybe that doesn't work well on those for whom english/'merkan is a second language.
Maybe I should be less subtle next time. Nah.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
What I really need is something that will harness the energy of this incessant tapping. Give me some dummy keys or something that I can tap on and I think I could run the entire floor.
Apparently it burns alot of calories so why not put it to other uses too?
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
Several years ago, the book Synners by Pat Cadigan had a portable computer powered by two electrodes that were inserted into the users body. Kind of like one of those potato clocks from years back. Wouldn't that bring new meaning to those web pages with the "powered by Jolt" gif?
OH yeah, the book I mentioned was good, I'd recommend giving it a read, if you can find it...
Anyone care to hazard a guess how much energy can be extracted from your typing fingers, relative to how much energy the laptop consumes?
Personally I think this is just a way to get people to spend more on laptop repairs... ("uh-oh, battery's low, I'd better start smacking this thing around!")
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Seems to me that if battery life is that important, and you are looking for a way to recharge it, the keyboard won't quite cut it. How about building a fold-out crank onto the side that attaches to a generator? Then you market it as a laptop/exercise machine. Face it, your average geek could use a little exercise anyway (I know I could) and I'm sure running the crank a few timers would generate a ton more power than the keyboard would. Not to mention how fun it would be to watch someone working that crank when they realized that their power was running out just when they were trying to save that presentation...
Ok, so they put a generator in the keyboard. But as much as normal lusers (and all those designers, too) use their mices, wouldn't it be good to put a generator into the mouse? At least, it does not harm if the mouse is a bit harder to move; you'l be steadier on your hand...
Note: If some company atempts to patent this idea later on, this post may be refered as prior art. This idea should be free unlike the keyboard-thing... Oups, if it isn't allready patented, I mean...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Or use my solution... put the laptop in your backpack, and wear that onto the plane. It's a lot harder to steal a backpack most of the time, and most people don't expect a plain old backpack to contain something of such value. ;)
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
And I suppose moving the mouse charges the battery, too? Must be an evil plot to get people to play Pac-Man to recharge their batteries.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
If they could figure out a way to capture the constant motion of the stylus on a Palm, and given the low power consumption of the things, perhaps then we could enjoy battery-free computing...
Silly Rabbit, sigs are for kids.
How much power does it take to run a keyboard? Would this be enough to power the keyboard alone, making it self-sufficient?
Already been done. I don't have the link handy, but a person has done something even more impressive than this with a recumbent (2-3 computers IIRC).
Reminisce on Art Blakey, Caravan it for the Duke, dance it home for Dennis Chambers and voilà, laptop is charged!
Make you wonder about this whole deal. The only possibility that I could think of this being acheieve is a super-sized KB and oh, some liquid nitro. I don't know about you guys, but my fingers hurt in the winter time due to the cold.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
I beg to differ. Laptops can also be handy if you'll be away from home for any length of time, have a national ISP (or at least don't move out of your ISP's area of coverage), and can't live without your Internet fix. :) In particular, if your job requires you to live in a temporary apartment for a while, a laptop may be the way you stay wired.
Just one thing: if you travel by plane with a laptop, be very careful how you transport it... if you carry it in a laptop case onto a plane, the risk of it being stolen is quite high, and if you pack it in your checked luggage, you run a risk of the screen being cracked, and that is expensive and not usually covered under the manufacturer's warranty. (I learned the latter lesson the hard way -- I was fortunate enough to have purchased a separate warranty from CompUSA for the screen, but the thing's taking forever to fix.)
One way you might try transport the laptop is to put it in a hard-sided briefcase and stuff clothes around it, then put the briefcase in another suitcase. Alternatively (since briefcases are hard to fit in other suitcases), you could try carrying the briefcase on the plane; it might not scream "steal me!" quite as loud as an actual laptop case.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
This one may be real, given that a patent number is quoted, but then the USA patent system is so crocky, that doesn't mean anything anyway.
I wonder how efficient this is, what's the ratio of energy gained from magents to the amount of energy required to move your finger to depress the button?
Think about it... how the hell could your finger's typing produce enough energy to power your laptop?
.002 seconds. It's still doing what it was advertised to do, and Compaq sells more laptops because of this worthless feature.
This has to be a marketing ploy. Compaq advertises this feature, people say "cool", and they buy it. I'm sure they can incorporate this little feature into the machine, but it may only extend your battery life by
Your PII processor running at full load takes about 25 watts of power. At the science museum of Minnesota, they have an exercise bike hooked up to a generator that powers a 25 watt light bulb, a radio, a tv, and other assorted devices. You use a switch to switch between them. I know from experience that to light that 25 watt bulb, you have to pedal at a pretty good pace. There is no way in hell that your fingers could produce enough power to light that damn bulb. Even if you stored up the energy from your finger tips and released it into the bulb, you probably couldn't get enough.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Enough
Fiat Lux.
since the subject is getting power from every day activities, how about a shoe that generate energy as you walk? I bet this would generate much more energy then a keyboard.
IMHO the keyborad is the last piece of generating energy, for computer use I think that maybe a mouse or a joystick would generate more energy then the keyboard it self, I could be wrong.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
My generator don't add any noticable resistance at all. If it didn't make an annoying sound I'd never remember to turn it off in the daytime.
Don't know about your neighbourhood, but in my whereabouts everyone uses the generator kind. I'd really hate run out of batteries late at night, especially since it could get me fined.
Don't hate the media, become the media.
Well, if you're like me, and probably quite a few out there are, you tend to fidget (tap feet, shake body here and there, etc). I read somewhere that a day's worth of fidgeting expends the same amount of energy as 20 minutes worth of walking or something like that.
So a pedal to exploit the natural tendency of foot tapping (more of a generalized leg up-down piston motion, actually), sounds like a great idea.
"Stop shaking the floor!" "But, the floor shaking is what's powering the computer right now!" >G.
Queue up a bunch of stuff. When boss comes around, send them away. Start typing like mad. Boss thinks you work hard.
;-)
(In a dilbert-like company, of course, and there's lots of those around).
Serves as a good "boss-radar" too. Listen for the amount of incessant keyboard sounds. If it gets louder and faster, boss is coming
nt.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
why not have the spin of the hard disk drive a generator that will recharge the battery?
I did some work last year on the same technolgy but for electic card. The concepts are really simple and all you really need are some wires and magnets. Our system for cars was going to add something like 300 pounds to the car b/c of all the magnets etc... You'd think the added weight would be too much for a lob top. I guess b/c their voltage requirements are so small (Compared to an electric car) that their magnets are light enough.
--------------------------------------
in a world without bounderies or fences, who needs Gates anyway?
Please, I beg of you, do not encourage the loud typers.
There is nothing more annoying when you're sitting in the school computer lab at 3 am trying to puzzle out a particularly gruelling problem than someone who loves to hear themselves type. They pound away at the keys as loud and fast as possible, convincing themselves that they are cool due to their rapid button pushing skills- nevermind that a trained monkey could do the job just as efficiently.
These people are second on my list of annoyances only to people who like to hear themselves talk while in line for a club.
Do *not* give them a legitimate reason for this loud-typing behavior.
--
Grouchy and loving it.
-- First post (by a female living in a state that begins with M and does not end in a vowel with a birthday that falls
Professional racing cyclists have been measured generating about 400W of power during a sustained effort, and considerably more for a brief period of time. Obviously, we're not all pro cyclists, but I'd think that even the average slashdotter could easily generate 25W with their legs. (Maybe more after a couple of mints). Doing the same with your fingers is another matter altogether. :-)
I suspect the experiment at the museum was not working properly, or was badly designed. I remember doing the same thing at a big museum in Munich (forget the name, it was very good though)
and struggling to light the bulb, despite the fact that I am a reasonably competent amateur racing cyclist. Of course, as soon as I had collapsed into a sweaty heap a five year old child stepped up and started up the TV set, apparently effortlessly...
Getting back towards the subject, has anybody used one of those batteryless torches where you squeeze the handle to light them up? Those must need a couple of watts, and my little hands got tired pretty quickly. I can't see how typing could possibly generate enough power to have a significant effect on the battery life of a notebook, but I'd love to be proved wrong.
This story reminds of some Speed Controllers(Novak?) put into Radio Controlled Cars. When the juice was off, the speed controller would use the electric motor as a un-optimized generator and feed the spikes back into the battery. I think it gave like upto an extra 1 minute runtime on a 4 minute race pack. Every bit counts on that stuff.
Strange, that this is Compaq yet again...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Save all your work now.
Oh crap!!!
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Power has been restored. You may now resume work normally.
- - -
the idea is technically sound, if a bit goofy. There are thousands of things we do every day that could be tapped for energy. How about putting a solenoid on the toilet seat? Or weighted pendulums to the outsides of our knees? I hope this guy and Compaq don't end up making any real money off of this, cause if they do, I can see a huge explosion of silly patents in our near future. Not that there's not already a preponderance of silly patents :)
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
0.1W of power for one second? Considering that watts are defined as J/T, I think that's a little more information than necessary.
No wonder Compaq needs some crazy idea like this.. the CPU sucks energy like mad. It's bad enough that Intel needs to castrate its 25W Pentiums into a 9W weakling CPU just to save energy on laptops. Adding such regenerative "technology" would only add to the already-exorbitant price of the Armada line. All Apple PowerBook G3s use the same CPU as in the desktop line.. the G3 only uses about 5W of power and the batteries last about 5 hours each. Oh yeah, laptops are used for more things than just executive work. I'm a graphic designer and my PB G3/266 is great for Photoshop or Flash 4. However, lately it's been a grand portable Playstation (Connectix VGS) and Starcraft box.. on batteries it tends to last about 3 1/4 hours playing Gran Turismo while hooked up to an S-Video Toshiba widescreen TV
-----
Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
I think it's fairly high. These researchers at the UofC were trying to find out what height a keyboard should be at and what level was the least stressful on hands and wrists (turns out it is if you put your keyboard in your laptop). They tested everyone from kids to adults and had them tap away. They measured for energy and stress.
I type at 75wpm on a keyboard (50wpm on an old fashioned manual), but my fingers are always cold!
perhaps the next ideia will be put pedals on desktops. ;) a good excuse for the geek that needs to exercise his body and don't want to get off of his computer...
And I see gangs of geek-bikers with laptops in his bikes... crossing the night...
h@hh@hh@...@.&.... "You shall not pass!"
Yes, exactly. I think a better strategy would be to take advantage of the effort expended in carrying the laptop, not unlike the kinetic energy system in a Rolex watch; say, absorbing the energy from the battery through piezoelectric mounts.
Thoughts?
Other people have pointed out that capturing power from keystrokes would not generate much power, but you need to remember that most people aren't going to actually do those calculations, and a commercial advertising a computer that captures power from your keystrokes would sound ``cool'' and ``hi-tech''. It's good marketing.
Besides, they should be generating power from the movement of a trackball, not the keyboard. After all, most people are mouse-pushers who have never seen a command-line.
-- Paperwork is the embalming fluid of bureaucracy, maintaining an appearance of life where none exists.
I'm not going to use a keyboard that requires
me to apply more than 5 newtons to a key.
Let's say the key course length is about 2mm.
That's 10^-2 J per keypress, neglecting the losses
in transformation from mechanical to electric
energy.
You need 10 keypresses to get 0.1W of power for
1 second.
Forget about having your notebook run on that
alone. Keyboard power is somewhere between
"little influence" and "neglectable".
Could be more practical for a PDA without a
hard drive, but then the trend for these things
is not to have a keyboard at all.
We aren't using all of the energy that we could be using. Everytime we lift one of those laptops we put in potential energy. Currently underdevelopement is ways of recovering that energy and transfering it directly to your laptop. All that it requires is for you to DROP it from the height that you lifted it to.
Yes folks, it's that easy. Worried about not having enough battery power. Just pick up your laptop and drop it several times and your worries about not having enough life in your batteries will just fall away. If it isn't working then throw your laptop on the ground harder, thereby transfering extra KE into the laptop.
Other technologies coming soon:
The 5 lb Sledge hammer
And
Dynomite
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
What I want is a power generator a-la 'Seiko Kinetic Watch' so that when I get fed up with the idiocy coming out of Redmond (or Compaq for that matter) I can throw my laptop against a wall and it'll charge the batteries...
Wah!
A problem with most current keyboards is that they don't do a good job absorbing the (considerable) energy imparted to the keys. Some of it gets dissipated putting wear on the keyboard, but most of it puts wear on the tendons, muscles, and ligaments.
Soaking it up in the keyboard is good for the hands. Soaking it up by turning it into juice and shoving it somewhere, rather than flexing and heating keyboard moving parts, is good for a hand-friendly keyboard.
And as long as you've turned it into juice, why not shove it into the battery. It may not be enough to power your machine, but it might make a noticeable difference in battery life. (And you might be surprised: There's a LOT of power in physical motion, and electromagnetic generators with losses of a few percent are considered inefficient.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Dude - grow up. Strike 1, you're a troll, strike two you're flamebait...you keep going at this rate you'll end up being in /etc/baddies on slashdot...
/. I was called a troll too (and look how much I've improved now :P ) - and I didn't even post anonymously. There are a lot of better things to direct your complainergy to then to that post - perhaps you should use it to recharge your laptop.
Heck, the first time I posted something on
OFTC: By the community, for the community
No more wasting my time on IRC at work! Now my excuse will be, "I'm charging my battery, sir! I'm saving the company money even as we speak!" I'm sure he'll buy that! =]
Why not put coils of wires around them? These things spin quite a lot right? Certainly it'll make more energy than typing. ;).
Hell, disk drive plates are already magnetic
Floppy and Zip drives could harness energy when you add and remove disks.
Putting tiny solar panels over the little leds on the keyboards and monitors would help too.
Every bit counts!
On a more serious note. What about microwave energy? There's already enuff of it around now days, why not transmit energy to mobile devices? Anyone got a working Tesla coil?