More items that don't deserve patents

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You've missed the point - these are self-contained devices that produce reliable, although small, amounts of power from ambient vibrations. Sounds novel to me.

-- Joe

Self-winding watches have been around forever.

At least to me the idea of harnessing sound random movement and converting it to electricity (rather than tightening up a spring) is an obvious extension. People have been working on such "micropower harvesters" for decades now...

You make the same mistake most do when considering the worth(lessness) of patents. You don't have the claims. Without the claims this is nothing more than a useless newsblurb to fill a just as useless trade rag.

(I hope I got this right)

How about the fact that all of the dollar store "shake lights" that I ever bought were "fake shake lights"? In my experience actually opening up 3 of these of 2 different brands, the movable slug was not magnetized, the leads of the coil were shorted together, and there was a battery consisting of (I forget which already) one or two lithium coin cells of some CR???? type.

Maybe the prior art needs to be a non-dollar-store "shake light".

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

I'm willing to bet that if we start seeing little LED flashlights powered by semi-random movement of the body throughout the day utilizing little "energy harvesters" as that link indicates, there'll be plenty of fakes of those too. :-)

Mmm, yes, indeed it would.

For a large enough animal a (real) shake light is probably already a pretty effective energy scavenger. :-)

---Joel

They are not based on parametric excitation. The idea is possibly a viable one for powering some devices with solid state piezo device.

There are only a limited number of ways to convert mechanical energy to electricity. Capturing the energy from the environment is the tricky bit.

The novelty is in how they draw power efficiently from aperiodic vinrational excitation. It is a modern day variant of the self winding wristwatch. And may well find its first application in that role.

Regards, Martin Brown

Robert Baer wrote in news:WtednW3dnestkS7WnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@posted.localnet:

those dollar store shake lights actually have lithium cells in them; the one I bought for $3 had a CR2032 and a CR2012 in series,no capacitor or diodes on the PCB,and the induction coil was unconnected.

Absolutely!

A shake lite is not "self contained"? They are of one piece like those mentioned in the "disclosure", they produce reliable power like those mentioned in the "disclosure", they are small like those mentioned in the "disclosure" (altho not quite as small), and if the owners have the shakes or position it correctly when walking like those mentioned in the "disclosure" the differences are essentially zilch.

Very true; that article is rather late so to speak.

...and claims are also worthless unless one has millions of dollars to enforce them.

Ah. You could always try to sell the patent to a company that does have the cash to enforce it. Better still, get a royaly finance deal set up in exchange.

Mark.

it

Ok, that's the reality of any intellectual property. If you can't defend it, it's not worth much.