Faradeus : self-charging flashlight

Hi there. I’m a novice on this forum and hope you accept newcomers with weird ideas :student:

I want proudly present you a … 20 Lm pocket flashlight.

Wait… 20 lm and proudly in one sentence? And the answer is still YES. We’ve reinvented classical principle of electroinductive charging and made self-charging flashlight with decent brighness and efficiency.

If you like the idea - please click the photo and check our Kickstarter project.
Feel free to ask any questions.

The page says 1 hour of use between charging. Does the light output decrease as the capacitor charge decreases?

Seems a nice idea! Subscribed to see what will be done with this :+1:

At max charge you’ll have ~60 minutes at 20 Lm. Inside we have a battery and supercap. Supercap is chraged very fast (10-20 secs of shaking and faradeus in working mode) and after you’ve charged supercap it begins charging li-pol battery.

Thanks! But this idea won’t be brought to life without funding on Kickstarter.

s. I’m not a scammer and already accomplished 2 project on KS and you can check feedbacks about my work.

This would be a great light for lots of purposes. Kids, cars, multi day hiking trips. There are a lot of situations where 20 lumens is plenty of light. Tempting. Great idea.

Zombie apocalypse? :smiling_imp:

Also it maybe not clear from the video, but when you use flashlight with a belt strap it also will be charging a bit. Sure the best way is to attach Faradeus in the area of ankle.

Hmmmm…. here’s an interesting article that tries to estimate how many swings it would take to charge up a smart-watch. Based on the output and run-time of your light, it probably has a similar sized battery.

Anyway, the conclusion is you’d have to use over 10,000 arm swings to charge the battery, and that assumes 100% efficiency. And big arm swings, not little shakes!

Good luck to your kickstarter, but I’d rather stick in a AAA battery than shake tens of thousands of times.

That’s article has no connetcion to my project. I’ve shown in a video that shaking for several seconds already gave you a light. Have you missed it?

Efficiency depends on 3 main things:

1. Number of turns on coil. Faradeus has about 3500 turns. I guess smartwatch doesn’t have enought space for that, eh?
2. Power of magnet. I’ve installed extremely powerfull rare earth magnet.
3. Efficiency of diod bridge.

About little\big shakes - all you need is to make magnet travel from the beginning to end of 15cm tube. So no need in full swings. Little shakes are more efficient in my case.
And again: 10 secs of shaking = 60 sec of light. 1 minute of shaking = 6 minutes of light.

Not seen the video, does it have springs either end to ‘bounce’ the magnet back at the end of each pass?

Well, you have not really re-invented anything, I have a 15 year old plastic torch that has the exact same internals with 5mm led, a shaking magnet and inductor. It just has no supercap but that is not new either in this concept.

I like the nice design and I like the use of a supercap but would be happier if it did not have the li-po battery.

10 seconds shaking for a minute of light is pretty annoying but in a situation without batteries (i.e. zombie acopalyps) it should be usable.

If the zombie apocalypse is not happening however, a small 20 lumen flashlight with one AA battery will save you 6.5 hours of continuus shaking.

Still the concept is appealing.

All of the energy must come from the kinetic energy of your arm as you shake the light. That was the whole point of the article. There is no free energy for your device.

I think people underestimate just how much energy is in a simple battery, and how inefficient it is to do physical work to power something.

For example, a basic AA battery has about 2.5Wh of energy, or 9000 joules. That amount of energy is capable of lifting a 154 pound man (70kg or 686N) 43 feet into the air (13.1 meters). That’s like climbing up a ladder to the 5th floor of a building.

Trying to shake your wrist to lift yourself up 43 feet would take a huge amount of time. Like, well over 10,000 shakes!

I’m not bashing your project, just trying to put a realistic take on it. You haven’t “reinvented [the] classical principle of electroinductive charging”. You’re just converting a arm’s kinetic energy into electrical energy, and that takes a lot of work.

Sounds like the old shaker torches that never caught on.

Perhaps because so many were fakes, with just a primary coin cell and the coil, springs and magnet did nothing. The real ones did work though, usually with a NimH cell (before Liion and supercaps became available or affordable).

TBH, a crank wound torch is a far better solution than waving your hand around, I have three modern ones for emergencies and they are quite good at converting minutes of winding time into many times more minutes of light.

One of these might have been a comfort to the “Wild Boars” during their ordeal.

Though they are all cheaply made, I wouldn’t trust the gearboxes to last.

What is the unique selling point of this torch ?

PS: the supercap is a bad idea, an LED needs a well defined voltage to work consistently, a capacitor, whilst storing energy, has an exponential voltage decay. So unless it’s being charged to well above LED Vf, then dropped down to the LED through an efficient buck driver, I’d say it is a non starter.

Read the post.
The supercapacitor is short term energy storage, which then charges a lithium battery which then most likely drives the LED through some regulator.

Still, these shake-to-charge flashlights have been around for decades and as you said, never really caught on.
Not gonna spend a whole minute shaking a light, at most I spend 10 seconds to plug in a flashlight through USB in order to get several hours of runtime.
Also, 20 lumens is far too little, a few hundred is the minimum usable for most people, while 1000+ is almost standard.

Yes, cranks are more efficient. But, still very inefficient. I have an emergency radio that has both a crank and a small solar panel that can charge the internal battery. The manual states it takes 8 hours of cranking, or 3 hours of sunlight to charge. Guess which method I use? :wink:

I think the idea is that the supercap is used to capture the burst of energy from a shake, then the battery is constantly charged from the supercap. Given how long it would take to charge the battery from shaking, I imagine you could charge the battery directly if it wasn’t for the pulsed energy from shaking. Using a crank, for example, you can charge the battery directly because it’s constant power.

Yes, to make shaking easier.

Sure, I haven’t invented anything new (and guys, come on! I’ve mentioned Michael Faraday on a project page :wink: )
What are key benefits of my project in comparison with old plastic chinese flashlights? GOOD MATERIALS!

And I mean high quality internal components, ultra thin wire to have 3500 coil turn, diod bridge on schottky diodes, N45 rare-earth magnet. Everything I’ve wrote about are expensive components. I guess a magnet alone costs more then chinese flashlight itself.

Heh, imagine how much shaking you’d have to do to charge up a decent 1000 lumen light! You’d shake yourself to death, first.

Sometimes it’s bad to be honest :wink: Ok 20 Ansi lumens or 100000 Chineze lumens :wink:

Well, if the shaking action is similar, it could be easily used by the male population, and provide an ECO alternative to onanism.

I’m not knocking this, if it is done well and efficiently, reliably and durably I am interested. Just one moving part is very attractive.

Make it totally waterproof to a good depth (laser welded, or bonded) with a magnet/reed switch, totally durable and shock proof and I’ll be tempted

Nonsense, I was able to lead a group of 7 mountain bikers home in pitch blackness with one 18 lumen Petzl headlight. My first maglite was a AAA solitaire with 2 lumen output, in candle mode it could light up a whole room once your eyes were properly adjusted.