How cool is this!
Yes it operates similar to a shake light and a joule thief, but this guys circuit loops back the pulses and can run for HOURS vs minutes charging those small button ultra capacitors
I wonder if it is capable of pushing a few hundred mA continuous…imagine pushing a XP-E/G instead of those teeny 5mm LED’s
In fact check out his youtube channel…the guy has a TON of great experiments
“you can read by it” is a very bad metric for flashlights in general, but maybe an acceptable metric for shaker flashlights. “You can read by it!!!” is actually incredibly dim - trit spheres generate that much light for years at a time. I don’t have anything with a low moonlight mode, but I’d assume that the low-low-low moonlight modes some BLF’ers say aren’t useful are act actually way brighter than the “you can read by it!” point.
It’s a big cap, but it still doesn’t store much energy. He doesn’t mention in his video how many mA he’s feeding that 10mm LED, but I’d say it’s on the low side. Seems like it will light up down to maybe 2-3mA, so that’s probably where the drive current is hovering = from 5mA after a fresh shake down to 2-3mA for a long time.
If that’s the case, I’d say he’s getting maybe 0.02 to 0.1 lumens based on a lot of back-of-the-napkin math.
This reminds me of another project:
To be fair, this may be a really well constructed shaker light. It certainly seems better than the cheap ones I’ve seen.
What I meant to mention in there is that with the small amount of energy he’s got on tap, driving an XP-G is probably out of the question. I’m not into the joule thief scene - can you run an XP- series LED off of a joule thief?
True…watch his other video’s he runs incandescent with em…and it appears from the schematic side (the 100 turns), with fewer turns and thicker wire he might be able to lower the voltage (he runs 9 led’s in series) imagine dropping the volts to 3~ but upping the current by 9x…
The cool thing is…it runs for a very long time from a single bump of a charge, whether it be a magnet or from a bump charge from a battery
It’s not a joule thief it runs on it’s own feedback, thus the joule ringer
That thermoelectric generator flashlight is a very cool idea as well
I really don’t watch a lot of videos, I prefer write-ups… I spend a lot of time getting info together and videos slow the process to a crawl.
I have an old shake+capacitor light. I haven’t measured it yet (didn’t think of it until just now), but it looked to me like it put out at least 3 lumens… and that was with technology from ten years ago.
This type of light has other issues, but I doubt the output is anywhere near as low as wight was estimating. Even if the runtime is only a few minutes, it’s not such a bad thing if one merely has to give it a shake or two every few minutes to keep it running. The older ones needed to be shaken frequently and for a long time.
It’s possible that I just have a huge bias against anyone who’s youtube channel looks like his. Watching people discuss air-quotes~~“Alternative” and “Free” energy really gets me aggravated. If half of his mentions of “technology” or other empty terms were replaced with any form of measurement or data I’d probably be able to keep a more level head. The worst part for this guy is that I can’t tell if he’s actually drinking the Kool-Aid. I suspect that he is not~~ he enjoys tinkering, attention, and advert revenue.
Seeing that kind of thing in action certainly gets me aggravated to the point where I’m sure my lumens estimate became conservative at best.
Ah, understandable. I had a really hard time not exploding when an acquaintance of mine started going on about all the wondrous benefits of using oscillococcinum whenever she felt she might be at risk of getting sick.
If you’re not familiar with it, read its wikipedia page for a good laugh:
However, I think the idea of a human-powered light is pretty cool. I just haven’t seen one which was both functional and durable enough to be used for decades… and given that a single Eneloop can power my EDC for over a month per charge, I don’t see a lot of practical reason to pay attention to shake/dynamo lights yet. It would, at best, save me like 5 watt-hours per month (to charge a battery), or perhaps $0.25 over my entire lifetime. My interest in the idea is entirely just because it’s neat.
I also think that the idea of a shake, crank, or any other kind of human powered flashlight or device is neat. This guy seems to have assembled one with exceptionally high quality materials (and exceptional construction quality). As to the “looper”, I get a little lost but it seems very similar in operation to the Joule Thief - they both seem to depend on the same concepts. He posted up his vague diagram pretty recently, so I don’t want to be overly critical of that… but vague seems to be the name of the game. I’m assuming that the “SJR Looper” has nothing to do with the performance he shows off - it’s all in the quality of his construction & parts.
Homeopathy is bad enough without adding duck guts (always in impressive states of dilution of course!).
I loved the bit about what their public relations person said when asked if the product was safe… “Of course it’s safe — there’s nothing in it!”
Not to mention that the dilution is so extreme that it’s roughly one molecule per 10-to-the-320th-power copies of our entire universe. I stand a much higher chance of ingesting duck liver if I simply open a window and breathe. By their own specs, the product is the most duck-free substance in the known universe. But it contains duck. Or essence of duck. Or something like that.