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Tool Using Animal has built a few interesting Windbelt Micro Power Generators that use a Hard Drive Voice Coil as the generating coil. His first version can also be found here. I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across the fact that our LEDs were used in the project! The unit is based on Shawn Frayne’s work. "The video shows it in operation, careful tuning of the belt tension causes the the voice coil to resonate, that’s a good thing. Measured power output is 1.5 Volts AC with a short circuit current of 20 ma. The leads from the coil are attached to two LEDs wired in parallel with reverse polarities."
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April 30th, 2008
I’ve read this Instructable(.com) before, and I’ve also read several on creating Savonius Wind Turbines. All of them are very cool. My main challenge is that I’ve never been an electronics geek of any kind. I don’t have the knowledge to convert the kinetic into potential (via wires, solder, resistors, transistors ad infinitum to battery storage). Aside from directly powering an LED, I wonder how a pragmatic geek like myself could make use of these things.
April 30th, 2008
Hi,
its a cool gadget.
Has anyone tried this in inverse, like giving AC to the Voicecoil an using it as cooling fan??? I think, if properly tuned it could be a silent cooler for PC components.
May 2nd, 2008
Hubert the`project above cannot work in reverse and it certainly wouldn’t be silent, you would hear a hum or flapping noise. For a “silent” PC cooler some people have used ionic air circuits, the problem with those though is that they operate at a very high voltage where one mistake could completly destroy your computer.
Kozz, the project does produce enough electricty to charge certain batteries and could be used for that purpose. With the proper circuitry you could have a “free power” cell phone charger.