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Energy-generating soccer ball wins Popular Mechanics prize
- CrazedGeek 16y agoOfficial site: http://www.soccket.com/ http://www.soccket.com/ Can't buy one yet, though. Looks very promising.
- gregable 16y agoI'm not an expert, but this sounds like useless crap. The comment in the article mentions that this "could come in handy in sub-Saharan Africa, where less than 25 percent of the population has reliable electricity". My best understanding of this statement, from limited experience in africa, is that grid electricity is available but a little unreliable - it goes down frequently. This soccer ball will have expensive electronics for capturing energy and an expensive battery. Of course, if I have intermittent grid power and a battery, I'm already all set. I don't need the electronics to capture the kinetic energy. Worse, if this thing breaks in any way - and it's literally getting kicked around - to repair the innards probably requires cutting the soccer ball in half, which makes it pretty unlikely to be repairable.
- dandelany 16y agoI know it's just a prototype, but would it kill a mainstream news outlet to report an actual wattage number instead of "enough energy to do X for Y hours"? Assuming (conservatively) three wicked-bright LED's at a quarter-watt a piece, that's .75 * 3 = 2.25 watt hours. This is in the range of a rechargeable AA battery (2000 mAh * 1.2v = 2.4 Wh)