Hand Cranked Cell Phone Charger
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04. 4.07
We have shown many solar phone chargers, but the sun isn't always shining when you need to make a call. We have seen crank-up chargers as well, but we like this combination flashlight and crankup charger for cell phones for a lot of reasons: 1) it is good emergency backup (designed in Japan for earthquakes and other disasters) 2) it has built in red and white LEDs for additional emergency use, which can be set to white to act as a flashlight or flashing red as an emergency beacon; 3) with cellphone bills as high as they are, one should have to work a bit to make a call. 4) Imagine how many fewer people would be driving with cell phones to their ears if they had to stop and crank it up every eight minutes. (although many would figure out a way to drive, crank and talk at the same time) 5) only 2,000 yen or 20 bucks. ::Nodaya via ::Trendhunter
The emergency need of the hour is to grab this charger to meet the expectations of technology-driven life.
'Red and White', interesting.
I just wish they'd make these crack chargers a little more efficient and pratical. A great idea would be to keep them small like this, but allow them to easily attach to a bike or some other, more efficient human powered device for more realistic charging.
I recently decided to try using only dynamo powered lights at night and really wished that I had the option to crank the thing with my leg power, and have a longer period of time between charging than the 15 minutes I got with hand cranking.
I got one of these, it takes about 20 minutes to get 2 minutes of calling power. And let me tell you, 20 minutes of turning this handle ain't no fun...
The other end of the scale is a crank device by High Tide Associates. This sucker is, I dunno, something like 5-10x more efficient than the one shown here. 5 min of cranking will get you a LOT more than 5 min of talk time, that's for sure. And they're working on a leg version.
I've played with the hand crank prototype, and it's really quite impressive. The guys working on it are magnetics and software experts from the disk drive industry, so they have a keen understanding about how to milk all the efficiency possible out of a system like this.
Not for sale yet, but I'll be getting one when it is. See http://www.hightidelabs.com/