Motion-Powered Cell Phone Chargers
June 24, 2008 · Print This Article
You may have heard of the dance clubs that harness the energy created by all of those writhing bodies and use it to generate part of the building’s power. Now, we’re hearing about some cool new devices that will actually charge cell phones and other handheld electronics through movement – and you don’t even have to exert too much energy. M2E, a Boise Idaho based company, says their charger will capture energy from your regular everyday motions.
From earth2tech:
It works according to the principles of Faraday’s law of induction, which states that moving a conductor through a magnetic field will induce a current in that conductor proportional to the speed of movement. M2E Power has managed to tweak the output of the Faraday setup to generate a lot more power than previous kinetic energy systems — an increase of between 300 percent and 700 percent vs. what’s currently available, according to the company.
M2E Power tells us it’s talking with the accessories divisions of the major cell phone makers, as well as some of the major accessories manufacturers. Back in November the company raised $8 million from OVP Venture Partners, @Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures, to hire 12-15 people, mostly engineers and lab technicians, in an effort to get their first product into the military field sometime this year.
M2E Power aims to have the charger provide an hour of talk time for six hours of normal movement (about two days worth, assuming that you’re a light talker and only use your cell phone 30 minutes per day). As someone who dislikes talking on the phone and uses a cell phone fairly rarely, I would love to have this charger – I would never have to plug my phone into the wall again!
The charger may be available as early as 2009. The image above shows the current prototype (battery pictured for size comparison).
Link [earth2tech]
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Hey! My best man from my wedding works for them! He’s an engineer, so there’s a good chance he worked on THAT prototype.
I’ll ping him. We’ll find out.
Indeed he has. How cool is that.