[William] was 14 when he completed the three month long build of his generator. He had previously dropped out of school because “my country was experiencing some famine”. The only resource he had at his disposal was a library that is funded by the US government (sounds like that turned out to be a good investment!).
After seeing a photograph of a windmill he was driven to succeed by the mantra: “somewhere somebody did it, it didn’t fall from the sky”. He goes on to explain how he built a circuit breaker (pictured above) to prevent a short circuit from burning his house down. Two nails are wrapped in wire with a magnet in the middle. If there is a short circuit, one of the nails will repel the magnet while the other attracts it. The nail is connect to a switch and when it moves to one side the switch is opened, breaking the circuit. Upon hearing this, [Stewart] makes the obvious comparison between [Macgyver] and [Kamkwamba].
One of the most endearing points in the interview is a story [William] shares about his first experience with the Internet. He was invited to the TED conference in 2007 and someone asked him if he’d used the Internet. Of course he hadn’t and they then started talking about using Google. When the search engine was explained to him he suggested that “windmill” be entered as a query. When millions of hits were returned his revelation was “Where was this Google all this time?”.
This is an amazing story that we can’t get enough of here at Hack a Day. Make sure you don’t miss the interview which starts 12:25 into the episode.
In the military, you have to carry tons of stuff. This is something we hear and see all the time. They are always trying to come up with ways to reduce the weight or quantity of the things that you bring into the field. This power generating backpack harnesses the natural up and down motion of your steps to produce power. This could reduce the amount of batteries carried into the field greatly. That’s what they say anyway, how many batteries do soldiers normally carry around? Aside from that point, we think it is pretty cool. We could see using this to keep our cell phone or GPS charged on long hiking and camping trips. You could also build something of your own to work similarly.
Though not much info is readly available about it on the web, [Joe Carruth] is trying to build publicity (and venture capital) for his home-built solar electric generator. At its essence, it is a Stirling dish system with an adjustable composite mirror surface. This means that instead of having to rotate the entire contraption in order to follow the Sun, [Joe] only has to make the mirror segments pivot. A Stirling steam engine at the tip converts the energy into the movement used to generate electricity. Solar power plants (or ‘farms’) that are emerging are beginning to consider the advantages of using more efficient Stirling dishes rather than less efficient solar panels. If anyone has an idea as to how [Joe] can automate sun tracking for the mirrors, please post it in the comments. A couple more videos on the topic (in general) are available below: Read the rest of this entry »
[Dr. West] wanted to do his small part to help save the planet. He has built a small generator from a stepper motor and a tape measure. The tape part of the tape measure was replaced with some cord. The spring loading mechanism makes the string re-wind automatically, which is nice. He shows it attached to one leg, with the string tied to the other, generating power while he walks. This is cumbersome, but seems fairly effective. You can see him waking around in a video after the break. Would this benefit from a flywheel or friction drive to keep the motor spinning after each pull? How can he rig it to feed off of the motion of only one leg to avoid tripping hazards?
Building a generator can be a fun and fairly simple project. Getting a large DC motor however can sometimes be difficult. Here is a writeup on how to make a generator from an old washing machine drive. It looks like you might need to find a specific machine called the “Smart Drive” to follow their directions exactly though. If you happen to find one, or know of a unit with a similar motor, you can follow these directions to end up with a fairly decent wind powered generator.
In a two-part series called “PS3 Fab-to-lab” on IBM’s awesome developerWorks website, [Lewin] explains how to use the Cell Broadband Engine in a PS3 to create an audio-bandwidth spectrum analyzer and function generator. The set up consists of Yellow Dog Linux, an NTSC television, and an external USB sound card to provide the inputs of the spectrum analyzer and the outputs of the function generator. The sound card driver is written to simply capture or send the info in question (audio range only) and the NTSC television as the graphical interface. This hack involves a lot of coding with hardly any example code provided. The article is more of a guide than anything. If anyone gets this working, let us know!
