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Green biking
Great post from the Instructables about how to add a gadget charger to a bike. I often wondered whether this was possible with an exercise bike but the problem is always that you have to do an awful lot of pedalling to generate enough electricity.
This is best illustrated by a comment early on when they are describing how they thought they would make the device for runners using the innards of one of those shake to charge torches:
However, when we calculated how much energy we would be able to get from a run, we determined that it would take a 50-mile run to get enough energy to charge one AA battery. This was unreasonable so we changed our project to the bike system.
That means that if I ran to work, instead of catching the train, I would probably be able to keep in iPod charged. Maybe not.
I checked your link to instructables.com, what a neat site!
Get a gerbil and harness the energy it generates going round and round its wheel. very cute!
posted-by John Mann | May 15, 2009 7:05 AM
Really neat!
posted-by Lily | May 15, 2009 5:44 PM
I never would have guessed that this amount of exercise would generate such a small amount of energy.
I've got one of the hand-crank emergency flashlights and I crank it up for about a minute and it will power the LED flashlight for quite a while.
I guess either a AA battery has more energy than I gave it credit for, or my emergency flashlight's LED lights take a lot less juice to power than I know.
Brian Kurtz
posted-by Brian Kurtz | May 17, 2009 4:11 AM
The site is very clear and very neat.. Keep it up....
posted-by Angela Edwards | May 18, 2009 11:32 PM