Looks like New York’s fire brigade confiscated all of the gas (or bio-diesel) generators from Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park. Apparently the Fire Chief cites the generators as a fire hazard. This seems a dubious claim. One of the shots in the video after the break clearly shows fire extinguishers close at hand, but we’re no experts on fire code. We’d bet the concern is having combustibles around if the scene turns violent… or just wanting to pressure the group with the loss of a heat source.
Instead of going without, the movement received help from a neighboring protest group in Boston. Bicycle power replaces the missing generators as volunteers pedal to produce electricity. Students from MIT plied their skills to help design multiple charging stations that can be used by the community. It won’t be enough to provide heat for the ongoing occupiers, but it does let them charge their electronic devices which helps ensure that current information is still flowing out of this epicenter of activity.
Does anyone have any ideas for hacking up a heat source that won’t ruffle the feathers of local officials? If so, leave a comment. And if you’ve already got a post written up on the topic don’t be afraid to send in a tip about it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KFpwAgVJuk&w=470]
[Thanks 1116 Birchmont]
As others have pointed out, their focus regarding the coming winter months should be on insulating people rather than trying to build a heat system for every tent, tarp, and poncho. That said, having the ability to keep a few common areas warm — come February, even just 40 degrees or so will feel like a tropical paradise when you’ve been outside nearly continuously for months — would be an enormous psychological boon to the protesters. In addition, for all the airplay the “human microphone” has received, the protesters do rely heavily on electronic communication, so more power is a good thing for them to create, to say nothing of the increasing value of electric lights as the daylight wanes.
The Huffington Post article linked to suggests that they are currently seeking funding for more generators, and will distribute e.g. three bikes to the media tent, others to the finance, or library, and so on. That seems inefficient to me. I would centralize the bikes in a single location, then chain them together so that either multiple bikes can charge a single battery more quickly, or multiple batteries can be charged simultaneously. Call that location the Occupy Fitness Center. In theory one could also create treadmills (or a giant hamster wheel as mentioned above), or even cable-machines like you find in regular gyms (I have not bothered to determine if that would generate enough power to be feasible). Then you just move the charged batteries where they need to be. Dinner time? Send a few fresh ones over to the kitchen, and bring back their spent packs from lunch. The library’s holding an after-dark teach in? Give them some extra light.
The key is the centralization which, I’m afraid, isn’t much of a hack, but I think it would really help them, rather than each unit within the park having their own generators. After you’ve centralized power production and acquired enough generators, it’s a simple problem of marketing. Encourage the protesters to “Get Fit to Fight the Power!”, or even make a competition of it. Award prizes for whoever generates the most Watt-hours in a given day or week. Looking back at what I’ve just written, using words like ‘marketing’ and ‘competition’, this might have a bit of a time making it past the general assembly, but it could really work for them, depending on how many of the protesters they are able to convince to put in the work. Using the numbers in the article, with just 10 bikes, they could turn out 5 charged batteries an hour. I don’t know if that’s enough to do them much good, but if 100 people each pedal for 30 minutes, that’s 50 batteries a day. It adds up quickly.
tl;dr Once they’ve gotten more generators, and centralized their production, it’s just down to their ability to convince protesters that pedaling in place is helping to support the cause.
Centralizing the power generation does make a great deal of sense. It provides a sense of community if nothing else (and they sorely need more community interaction within the group).
It seems a bit wasteful to me, though, that they’re trying to raise money for these ridiculous generators. It would be far smarter to get volunteers to charge batteries off-site and bring them there a few times a day, from a practical point of view. They can keep the bikes as a way to stay warm, but they just going to wear themselves out trying to create electrical power in this manner for an extended period of time.
FIGHT THE POWER
I’ve been at the protest since day one, i keep telling them to use belts to piggyback more generators off of the bike. and i mentioned we could use compost (people are making compost) to heat up water flowing through a pipe in the middle of the compost heap and pump that through radiators
I’m going to ruin all your fun in your political debate on what should be done by just pointing out that regardless of what measurements are used, scandinavian countries top US in every positive category when they are compared, be it education, crime, debt, taxation etc. So shouldn’t we do what they do because its clearly working?
If its working, why are we bashing our heads against the wall and trying to make stuff that does not seem to work, work?
While I don’t condone the actions of the fire chief, I understand the reasoning.
You mean those socialist Scandinavian countries?
I believe that it did work because they were kind of uniform communities. Thesedays things are starting to fall apart due their immigration policies and companies moving out of the country due high taxation.
But they still doing well and all of them still have their own currency.
Would have been better to use a alternator, and a simple belt drive off the rear wheel hub. Looks like they used a simple DC motor.
Here’s a better example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVAZIDFMRXY
Occupy Denton is working on a better design. We look forward to competing with other Occupations to find a better way to produce power. We plan to charge car batteries for our media center and electric blankets. We are cold in Texas, it is difficult for me to imagine New York…
We stand in solidarity.
We ARE the 99$.
#OccupyDenton
You are the 99$ eh?
At the very least alternators would be much easier to come by cheaply for the majority of people.
I think the belt drive you are using makes much more sense than the friction method being used by the boston/new york folks. I’ve been wondering why they didn’t go that route.
I can only asume that friction drive is easier to setup.
It seems likely that the protestors will probably be leaving as quickly as they came, if they have to remove large heavy flywheels from the bikes (which would lead to move consistent power generation) re-fit wheels, refit tyres, etc it takes a lot longer than just removing the friction drive.
belt is more efficient, but not so significantly more efficient, (there are more losses in the power conversion than the drive system.)
I guess camping shops are few and far between in Manhatten, but there must surely be a gadget store that would sell hand cranked phone chargers or hand cranked torches, or hand cranked radios so that people can stay in contact, have light and still enjoy music?
There are a few people suggesting that batteries should be taken offsite. the trouble is that the average car battery can’t provide enough power for this to be viable.
If a laptop is drawing 100W then after all conversion losses are taken into account you’re probably drawing 10amps from the battery, this means that you are discharging batteries (to fully empty) inside 8 hours (and degrading the future life of the battery).
So in a 24 hours day you need at least 3 batteries per laptop. but ideally perhaps 4, five or 6.
you also need to be able to charge a battery from fully discharge to fully charged in less than 8 hours (which you can’t do properly without damaging it [fast charge is meant for emergencies not everyday use]) after that you need someone living fairly locally to be bringing the batteries to and from site!
That’s the person that you’ll be working like a horse, and that’s the person that will be giving and giving and giving until they give up.
You have to charge batterys onsite, unless you have someone who lives very locally who doesn’t mind walking back and forth between the park and their home charging batteries, and who realises that is all they will be doing. -no stopping to enjoy whatever fun is going on.
electric heaters are pretty much right out as well, drawing far too many ampres at battery voltages,
but if electric heaters are a must (assuming generators can’t come back onsite and propane/butane/meths heaters are out on fire concerns.
it’ll be cheaper to go down to a local electronics store and buy resistance wire.
Make a wooden frame stretch the wire between the frames then fill the middle with tile grout. (that’s how I made a small heater for a chicken brooder).
or, in contrast to what I said earlier, use incandessant car headlight lamps as these produce both light and warmth. but only really enough heat for a small 2 person tent, and far too much light for said small 2 person tent.
As another commentor said earlier, if you want to actually stay the course, and have enough other people stay the course, then you need to work smarter, learn to work with your supplies rather than trying to over work your supplies.
decide what’s more important, running a webcam 24×7 or giving your supporters light and heat.
hint: if you can’t provide supporters with light and heat soon your web cam will be watching an empty park.
three words,
reduce, reuse, recycle
reduce: your power consumption, only power what’s truely needed to last the duration. not the nice have’s (disco balls?!)
reuse: when you’ve finished cooking put bricks on top of the stove top to absorb the heat, use them as a storage heater.
recycle: if your supplies come in cardboard, put the cardboard underneath your bedding to provide air gaps for insulation, if you’re reading a paper screw up the pages and put then inside a plastic refuse sack then sleep on that to get you off the floor.
on terribly cold nights, when you need to go to the bathroom go in a plastic coke bottle then put the cap back on and put it inside your coat, the heat you’ve just pee’d out will help to re-heat you. -make sure your aim is good though, nobody want’ to hug a wet pissy bottle.
From what I’ve heard, alternators are very inefficient. Why not, they are usually hooked to big powerful car engines. Has this been the case in your experience? I would think you’d want the most efficient method of producing electricity from your effort.
40 people was hospitalized for hypothermia
Too all the people saying HAD sounds more and more pro OWS, I disagree. Everything in the article seems to be pro hacking – there is not a single mention of the political ideology in the article. I think the reason OWS comes up again and again is because the very situation that the protesters are in is very conductive to the basic nature of hacking – coming up with clever on the fly solutions for solving simple or complicated ideas.
Did it really take all the genius of MIT to figure out that you could turn an alternator using a spinning thing (like a bike wheel)?
this isn’t a hack, and without any details of anything that they are doing there how is anyone meant to make any meaningful suggestions?
Based on previous articles however.
suggestion 1, get rid of the mac books, use tiny net book PC’s, (don’t care what OS they run -this isn’t about *that*) they might not be as familiar to you, but they are a lot less power hungry, and therefore your power will last longer.
suggestion 2, raise tents from the ground by the use of pallets and a board over the pallet to level the ground. if you can’t raise your whole tent, just raise your bed/seat. using a camping bed.
suggestion 3, conserving energy is better than generating new energy.
so wear hats/scarves/gloves insulate put a pallet under your tent, or at the very least corrugated cardboard to add an air gap.
Use low power computers (e.g. net books) where possible, use LED lights instead of incandescent bulbs where possible.
Suggestion 5, needlessly loose as little energy as possible. get waterproofs, keep your bedding and clothes as dry as possible, wet clothes will conduct heat away from your body faster.
Suggestion 6, cold people should pedal, if you need a radiator for a heat source you’re doing it wrong. if a person is cold then they need to pedal, then they generate their own heat.
suggestion 7, Convert power as little as possible, (conversion is waste).
Get small 6v lead acid batteries and charge these with a load of USB plugs connected up to them (with minty boost style circuits on them.) use a couple (of batteries), charge them in parallel, then let people plug their phones into this rather than converting your hard earned 12v power into 5v (possible more than 50% wasted as heat in a poorly designed supply)
6v batteries are found on lawnmowers, 6v alternators and dynamos are also found on lawnmowers, regulators can come from the same place.
OK, so that means you need a dedicated phone charging bike generator. but that’s not difficult. and since most people are going to want to charge their phones this doesn’t seem like it’ll be a waste of effort.
(Given that the average phone charge is 2 hours, and the power draw throughout the charge is ~5w)
1 person can easily generate 150watts for 20 minutes, e.g. 6 people can fully charge 30 phones).
@gvp kudos for actual organizational thinking. Then again, if the OWS people are anything like the indymedia/commonground folks I ran into post-katrina, the centralized nature of the plan is going to kill it. Not to mention all the internal squabbles that will erupt. “dude I really need a battery to run my disco ball!”
I don’t have nearly enough information on the nature of the OWS people to speculate as to whether it would be feasible, but it seems that the inclusive, consensus-building nature of the movement — which has hitherto been a strength to them — represents a risk when faced with something like having to generate their own electricity. How do you prioritize whose cell phones, laptops, disco balls, etc. get to be charged?
Would it be acceptable to designate a couple bikes for ‘personal electricity’? You want to charge your cell phone, but don’t really have any operational need for it, or maybe your protest takes the form of wearing a string of illuminated christmas lights wrapped around your body at all times. Wait your turn on one of these bikes, then pedal until your heart’s content. Or ready to explode, as the case may be.
Then the majority of machines are set up to support the operational electrical needs of the movement, things that help sustain it, i.e. cooking, media, etc. On its face, this seems like a reasonable technical solution, but could prove ideologically problematic. The prioritization of the operational needs of the movement over those of individual protesters seems at odds with the sense I get of their ideology, and I can also see an argument that it’s discriminatory against protesters who — for reasons of age/injury/time available/fitness/etc. — are unable to pedal as hard or much as others. There are probably consensus-built ways to overcome these objections. This though assumes that scarcity is an issue, though. With enough infrastructure and enough willing pedalers, it’s not a problem. From reports of how much money they’ve been taking in, they shouldn’t have problems getting the kit they need, bringing me back to my position that it’s largely a question of marketing.
On a more technical note, dan makes some excellent suggestions regarding efficiency. It’s probably a really good idea to standardize on a smaller battery if the majority of what they’re charging are small electronics and low-powered lights. Keep some of the car batteries around for bigger needs.
And for goodness sake, yes, put down the effing macbooks! There seem to be an awful lot of people with a whole bunch of electronics there, to the point that theirtheft is becoming an issue, let alone the logistics of powering them all.
Maybe a solution would be creating an Internet tent(s), with some low-power netbooks (or something even lighter, one of those ARM SoC devices maybe?) for communal use, preferably running a free operating system, and encouraging people to leave their personal laptops at home. Though dan doesn’t care what OS they’re running, it seems to me that the Free Software Foundation has interests if not identical to, at least in line with a lot of OWS. Perhaps they could even be persuaded to help underwrite some of the cost of acquiring the needed kit. Anyone know if Richard Stallman has made an appearance at Zucotti Park? If there were a single place in the country right now ideal for FSF-evangelization, surely it’s right there.
Finally, an off the wall idea — to hear the media tell it, there are near-continuous drum circles going on at OWS. How feasible would it be to outfit all (any) of those drums with piezoelectric transducers? It seems that there is a lot of energy just going to waste (without getting into the relative merits of drum circles) that could be harnessed. A single drum hit may only generate a tiny amount of energy, but a drummer playing 16th notes at 100bpm for an hour strikes the head 24000 times. If they’re drumming anyway, it’s at least worth looking into.
Sorry, re-posted from a sub-thread above because I intended this to be a stand-alone post:
Am I the only one wondering what ever happened to all that big talk, from the Hackaday editors, about finally stepping up and deleting posts that are unproductively negative and/or not related to the technical merits of the hack posted? Is this just proof that all that hot air was just because the ire/perversion happened to be directed at someone they had a personal connection with? So far we have around 200 posts here and almost none of them have anything to do with the technical issues of the hack…
not enough censorship ? why dont you go read newspaper
@Colecoman1982:
Actually, I’m with therian on this one.
And there are no technical merits to this hack. Not even any details, really.
The only thing worth a damn is the pictures/videos.
Besides, an active discussion on this post doesn’t hurt HAD’s street cred at all– it’s not adversely affecting any other sites or projects, so it’s just more revenue for them. That’s certainly not a bad thing.
U mad.
If you can’t see politics in hacking then you need to reconsider your perspective. DIY and hacking culture flies in the face of the consumer culture that the OWS protests are against. Companies get rich by selling mass produced, one time use only, restricted products. Hacking puts the product back in the hands of the user.
Whoa. How did a subthread end up down at the bottom of the main thread all of the sudden?
More OWS hacks please, this is awesome!
Yea the comment are fun. Not trying to be a smart ass ,but sometimes I find entertaining if I’m in the right mood, if I’m not I go to the next article.
I very rarely post, mostly just read. But sometimes I feel inclined to respond to the ones that sound like sphincter muscles slapping together in rapid succession….
Maybe one of the first steps would be to hammer out a power budget. Photovoltaic would be a nice supplement , but may be physically unworkable in that shared human environment. any vehicles used during the day to run errands could be used to recharge 12 V. batteries, even if those errands are to haul batteries to an offsite charging station. Even the smallest automotive alternator isn’t going to be very human power friendly. Perhaps the most common small auto alternator could be identified, and an electrical engineer consulted to how to rewind the stator to give a more human power friendly output. Make a volunteer work like a horse you are going to run out of volunteers. However give the a task they can perform, and still be able to hold a conversation, more are likely to volunteer. That’s where power budgeting comes in require the users to adapt to the available power, not the other way around.
Some form of WVO system with waste oil donated by local restaurants?
Unsure of the legalities of it. A small diesel engine could be attached to a bicycle and used on their existing setup to give the people pedaling a break. Could be easily powered by veggie oil.
Of course the oil gelling up would be an issue. Would have to be kept at a reasonable temp or cut with diesel when the authorities weren’t looking.
I guess the real question is would a bicycle mounted WVO setup violate fire codes? The owner could simply ride it off if it became an issue. The fuel is cheap and or free if gathered locally. The stored fuel is much less of a fire hazard. Not sure if used cooking oil is a fire hazard according to the fire code or not. Just an idea.
What about a hydroelectric setup running off of a fire hydrant? Could be set up as a loop that just taps the existing water pressure without using any water. Would create an insignificant drain on city resources. I can see the fire chief having a huge problem with that though.
In parts of Ohio a lot of people use corn kernels in iron stoves. A five gallon bucket of hog corn can heat a decent sized house for a day. Probably illegal as well though despite being a minimal fire risk if contained properly.
I’m seeing somewhat of an overlap between Burning Man techniques and Occupy… techniques. They have similar problems in terms of needs and load, except that in Occupy… they are surrounded by infrastructure they do not have permission to use.
Generators and crowded spaces do not mix. I’m aware of two horrible accidents involving people refueling hot generators, and several cases of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The problem with solar panels and flimsy structures is that if they fall and break, broken glass ends up all over the place. AGM batteries are safest but good use can be made of conventional deep-cycle and even small lead-acid batteries: http://www.windsun.com/Batteries/Battery_FAQ.htm
Occupy… Burning Man. Link here: http://www.burningman.com/environment/resources/energy.html
Well designed shelters can make a big difference, especially when windows to southern exposures are planned for and provided. http://www.shelter-systems.com/
How about heating up the insides of people with one of these full of soup on each block? They are both light enough (~75lb) and cool enough (~130F) that they can be picked up and moved while in operation, as well as giving off zero harmful emissions and being able to burn pretty much anything.
We have pieces like those lying around all over place…………gonna go make one
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15687873
I sometimes wonder what side the Government are on, it seems that the words “credit crunch” are enough to put the bean counters into overdrive.
If you ask me we should cut THEIR bloated salaries, see how they like living on the breadline.
#include “$0.02.h”
OK, most of you will have no idea what the hell I’m saying, but my very first thought on seeing this article was,
“Soylent Green is people!”
Way back in the late 70’s I connected a filament transformer with the low voltage windings connected to a bicycle headlight generator and the primary connected to an AC outlet. I was able to power a portable radio while I rode around town at a comfortable pace, but I had to pedal like mad to get any cassettes to play. The setup they have is not going to produce a while lot of power, but it’s probably adequate for keeping cel phones and other lightweight electronics alive.
you can scoop up the horse manure from the cops horses, throw a little dead straw or grass over it for a “coldframe” tent floor heater.
Second on the iron shavings, dont think you need the charcoal and salt either, rusting is oxidation, and will generate warmth. that is what is in the hothands paks.
Great article. Thanks for the info. Does anyone know where I can find a blank fd order form to fill out?