Very Fast Charging

I'm not clear how that would work.

NT

Should I ask where you propose they get the materials for a 3m wheel or a tower?

NT

All the solar garden lights I've seen didn't light up for long, and were no use at all in winter. Unless something's changed they're going to need more input one way or another. Junked small motors are low hanging fruit.

absolutely

It's mostly roadside junk, most of the tools too.

With over a billion people in poverty needing a wide array of things, that approach guarantees over 99.9% failure. Instead we publish guides that much more than 0.1% of people can realistically do.

NT

I get the same (750kCal = 3.15 MJ --> / 3,600 seconds = 825W = 1.2hp), but unless you're world class, that calorie count is either wildly optimistic, or reflects fuel burned and not mechanical output.

I checked a few sources and suspect the latter. Either that or nutritionists are quacks.

(The easiest accurate calibration point I know of is to run up a hill of known height/slope and time yourself, then figure out the ft-lbs/sec.)

In top shape (long distance runner) I managed ~5/8ths of a horsepower output running half a mile up a steep hill, IIRC.

FWIW, Wiki offers "A trained cyclist can produce about 400 watts of mechanical power for an hour or more, but adults of good average fitness average between

I don't what reasonable arm-power values would be. Simple muscle-mass ratios suggest it's a great deal less. I'd think sustaining 50W near impossible, unless you're Popeye or Hercules.

Cheers, James Arthur

When I was in the south pacific, I used a 20 watt automobile tail light powered by a small car battery. It usually lasted 5 nights at 5 hours a night.. The charging system where I worked was very inefficient consisting of a 240 volt AC input with diode rectifier and 1KW series dropping resistor. It was designed for several batteries in series, but everybody used it to charge just one battery and wasted the extra power. It was free power for me and they gave me the battery which I returned completely worn out when I left. .

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A light bulb+rectifier makes a decent rough-science car battery charger. (A real light bulb with hot tungsten in it)

A car battery would run micro-power LED lights for a small village for days.

I was building up to suggesting that--a vehicle could drop off a charged car battery once a week....or even a cellphone battery, charged from its cigarette lighter outlet.

A charged cellphone battery is ~4Whr, which is 400 hours of 10mW, or three months of 4 hours a night. And you could top it off with a garden-light size solar panel.

Cheers, James Arthur

On Tue, 24 Nov 2015 19:03:33 -0800 (PST), snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Gave us:

Same place Da Vinci did. Trees. Remember catapults?

Rope. Remember hemp? Strongest vegetable fiber there is.

A fairly tall wooden tower can be erected, and I was not the one who suggested a gravity based spin power mechanism. I merely gave an example of how one could be made and actually work.

Generator driven from a small gear. Small gear driven from a large gear. Large gear concentric with a large spool of fishing line. Fishing line takes many turns around a set of fixed pulleys hanging from a rafter, and around a set of pulleys suspending a weight.

As the weight slowly falls, the spool unwinds driving the large gear, driving the generator.

You'd need to remove the weight and have a quick way of winding the spool again.

Clifford Heath.

On a sunny day (Tue, 24 Nov 2015 18:59:21 -0800 (PST)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

I dunno 'bout you all, but _any_ old DC motor for _any_ old cassette player, CD player perhaps, toy car, with a propeller made out of wood, would charge a battery if there is any decent airflow, sometimes called 'wind', if no wind put it in a local stream (water power).

If you want more current an old car alternator perhaps.

Make a big wheel out of wood, 2 bike wheel and bearings, book shelves between those..

Hey!

I suspect it will bounce "domain not found" since my ISP has been taken over by a bunch of cowboys who could not run a piss-up in a brewery.

I am in the process of moving away from them. I was alerted to this new problem yesterday after seeing no incoming email from the outside world.

astronomers and with red LEDs you can get away with no series resistor if you only use spent almost dead cells in the thing.

The cost to make something basic is pretty much an LED, a couple of resistors and a means to hold the batteries which could be as simple as a piece of plastic water pipe offcut. No switch just bent wire hooks.

They have their uses if there is no power. I still think your best bet is a modification of the standard cheap Chinese garden LED light.

But it does work and works well in the wilderness.

The light output from the latest generation phosphorescence devices is incredibly good. Bright soon after sunset and although it fades through the night your eye sensitivity also increases to compensate.

It isn't really good enough for reading by but it is plenty good enough to navigate a camp site or room with no other source of light.

We use our emergency glo torch as a light source when out in the wilds. The side left facing the sun emits bright green even in dim shade.

Mine is about 10 years old and shows no signs of fading at all.

This isn't the old doped ZnS rubbish of yesteryear it is good stuff!

Lenovo T400 would be one example, I have not measured the power needed to run the LED at that brightness. Mine stopped working when I shortccircuited the backlight inverter board.

On 25 Nov 2015 10:25:33 GMT, Jasen Betts Gave us:

Should have kept your hands in your pants. :-)

I like the tritium lights too. There's something appealing about having a nuclear energy source in your pocket. Or on a bedpost.

Yeah. Anybody good is coding for Google or a startup. Everybody else works for ISPs.

Way back when digital watches were new and cool we converted a bunch to be self illuminating with a tritium fishing float. Worked well on Casio digital watches but made the chip vulnerable to reset by a flashgun.

The fad in watches now is big and all mechanical with immense "complications", so many gadgets that it's hard to read the time. Interestingly, watchmakers are using silicon parts in mechanical watches, probably MEMS fab technology. They call it silinvar or something.

Some mechanical watches have a thousand parts and cost a million dollars.

I was thinking about this after I posted. It's certainly fuel burned (and probably optimistic, to boot). I believe the other tool was power generated, however. The user set the power and tried to keep the speed constant (for best workout).

That matches my recent exercise experience pretty well. 100W on a stationary bike isn't difficult. 150, not so much, at least for any time.

Define "sustaining".

That would require the end users to hand over to some driver a charger & battery. It would never be seen again. If possible I want to keep someone making a regular income out of the loop, it would much increase the cost.

NT