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If you want to learn the merit of a product, look at how the inventors are spinning it. Here you see they're playing up how it'll make the lives of impoverished
by sbierwagen 16y ago
If you want to learn the merit of a product, look at how the inventors are spinning it. Here you see they're playing up how it'll make the lives of impoverished African orphan children better, and how it was created by a team of women, rather than the evil terrible Patriarchy.
This is colloquially referred to as a "bad sign".
In all seriousness, though, this looks like a pretty crappy product. "Shake-light" generators like these are already pretty miserably inefficient, and you'll only be getting maximum power when a kick is perfectly aligned with the axis of the coil, with the magnet at the far end. If you kick it at a right angle to the coil, or with the magnet at the near end, then it won't generate any power at all, and, even better, will react differently to the kick.
You could use three generators, for all three axises, but that would triple the BOM, and the magnets will interfere with each other. And you still have the "magnet on the wrong end" problem, and the damn thing will still wobble.
Additionally, electronics designed for use in adverse environments can either be cheap, or they can be good. Soccket could make them cheap enough that the target demographic could actually buy them, and get tons of bad press when they break more or less instantly, or they can make them good, and have one NGO buy a hundred of them... and have them break slightly less frequently. Soccer balls are not terribly durable, (because they have to be light enough to kick) and when your reputation rides on miraculously making them much more so, you're in trouble.
- winfred 16y agoI've looked at this "product" a while back when it showed up on Reddit (It's been around for about three years). If you look for at the background info of the designers, you'll see they have a marketing background, not engineering. And to construct their prototype, they actually took on those shake flashlights apart and stuck it in a ball.