This is very cool.
Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, Calif., saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional wind turbines don’t scale down well—there’s too much friction in the gearbox and other components. “With rotary power, there’s nothing out there that generates under 50 watts,†Frayne says. So he took a new tack, studying the way vibrations caused by the wind led to the collapse in 1940 of Washington’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge (aka Galloping Gertie).
Frayne’s device, which he calls a Windbelt, is a taut membrane fitted with a pair of magnets that oscillate between metal coils. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph slivers of wind, making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines. Frayne envisions the Windbelt costing a few dollars and replacing kerosene lamps in Haitian homes. “Kerosene is smoky and it’s a fire hazard,†says Peter Haas, founder of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, which helps people in developing countries to get environmentally sound access to clean water, sanitation and energy. “If Shawn’s innovation breaks, locals can fix it. If a solar panel breaks, the family is out a panel.â€
Video
Newsreel about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.
Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be available on Google Video, whose player has random access along the timeline. The You Tube player annoyingly needs to load fully before you can choose a location, and it doesn’t seem to cache in my browser. So I’ve had to restart the damn thing three times, and listen to the intro three times and still haven’t gotten to the end of the lecture. This isn’t so bad for the usual under-ten-minutes You Tube Video, but this one is almost an hour long. We’ll listen to the end together.
Cory mentions some problem he has with Google Video’s drm, that I guess does not apply to You Tube. Maybe this is why it is on You Tube.
“The brain is a little Python script I wrote that tags each picture with GPS coordinates that it gets live from my Wintec WBT-201, and hopefully when you play the video you see the position of the picture on Google Maps. The picture taking part runs really well and I could conceivably leave the laptop in the trunk, but I like to see the pictures as they’re taken. And besides I like to watch everyone freak out when they see the computer in the front seat, they think I’m doing some kind of deep scan on their cars for overdue parking tickets.” - Wrybread
Earthships have many interesting environmental ideas incorporated into them: use of recycled tires and cans for construction, passive solar heating, rainwater harvesting and treatment, low draw DC appliances. The basic idea is to construct with massive walls to moderate temperature. You aligning the windows for maximum effect in your location.
I wonder about using tires. Tires are primarily petroleum. I would not want to be in a well sealed container made from tires heated by the sun. But they probably aren’t being heated so drastically embeded in earth, and I hope earthships have decent ventilation. Tires can be recycled in other ways.
Solar towers use the chimney effect to drive turbines. This solar power device I’m sure appeals to the folks who enjoy owning centralized power plants. But it is certainly a more welcome neighbor than a coal or nuclear plant. I wonder what to do with all that plastic after its ten year lifespan.
Interesting information, crappy video. You can find many of the illustrations for this talk here: pdf
But this is well worth seeing, for an understanding of the state of this emerging technology. He talks about making it “easy to engineer biology, really easy.” The process is analogous to electronic circuits. He emphasizes the positive potential. I see an equal potential for disaster, leaving powerful tools in the hands of the greedy and stupid.
The Way Things Go - A lengthy (26 minute), and dangerous looking (It’s full of strange chemical reactions, flames and fireworks) video of a Rube Goldberg device. There are several dissolve transitions in it, which makes this kind of a cheat, but it is very cool anyways.
There is a short appended section showing some kids doing a Rube Goldberg project in school. That segment is what, for some reason, shows up in the image above.
