Portable Energy - from fire sticks to lithium

Last night there was a knock on my door at 3am, the flatmate wanted a flame to light his cigarette. We seem to have forgotten how to make fire without help. I have been reading Triumph of the nomads by Geoffrey Blainey. It has some interesting cultural facts regarding knowledge of energy generation.
Aboriginal fire sticks , the methods of fire making.

1. Pulling stick over bark, fire plough or fire saw
2. The bow-drill
3. The percussion method with pyrites

From fire as source of energy and light we have moved on to more chemical mean, emphasizing on coal, potassium, phosphorus and sulphur. Energy currencies like adenosine tri-phosphate which our own cells prefer to use. I collected a lot of matchboxes while I was young and yesterday the TV was filled with imges of David Beckham and James Bond carrying the Olympic torch across the British Isle. We simply cannot afford to forget how fire is made or let all the fire in our immediate vicinity go out.

Then things switched over to fire steel - ferrocerium and butane, petroleum derivatives. It is still our highest energy density power source being used in most mobile power hungry equipment. Next came the more metallic solid state power sources, burning without visible flames, quietly without explosions unless overheated in certain laptops.

Battery technology has gone through several generations - lemon battery, copper-zinc, zinc-carbon, NiCad, NiMH, Fuel cells, Vanadium Pentoxide,  Silver oxide, Lithium and CSIRO made some headway into ultra-batteries by coupling super-capacitors to conventional chemical reaction systems. All involve chemistry and pushing ions up and down electrical staircases to store up energy around the nucleus. With our highly connected life-styles we are plagued by nomophobia, recharge mania. Sometimes I remember the sky is the ultimate device and carry around solar cells to transfer energy from the sky device.

We are constantly pushing electrons downhill in an effort to climb out of this gravity well of a planet we call home. Our techniques to harvest energy so far are not good enough to give us a ticket out without destroying a fair amount of our civilisation in the process. We will have to come up with something rather drastic to get out of this bind, pseudoscience or not.

Fun with eutectic metals - Galinstan

I have been doing lots of full-wave electromagnetic simulation as part of my PhD and most of these techniques are applied for antenna design (as opposed to backscatter estimation for very complex targets i.e. forests). So naturally I decided sideways into antenna theory and started exploring malleable liquid antennas. These antennas have the advantage of taking strain and being easy to electro-mechanically tune and fit to a lot of form factors solid metal antennas cannot cope with.

The dominant material in liquid antennas is Galinstan - the mongrel made from Gallium, Indium and Stannum (well Tin). It sounds like some country in Asia Minor, next to Afganistan and Pakistan, but in fact it occupies a spot somewhere near Hydrargyrum (Mercury) in electrical and thermal properties. It is also not as toxic as Mercury, which caused the Mad Hatter and Isaac Newton to become rather eccentric.

Galinstan is apparently also rather useful for its ability to generate electricity when compressed, rather like piezo crystals. This has led to applications in the infamous heel/toe strike device, with patent holders claiming upto 10w per foot. I am sure the shoe phone is not far away.

Conceptualizing the YouCharge - Solar + Bike powered Charging Station

Last night Derek and I put our heads together and finally came up with costing and timing for the human powered mobile device charging station, temporarily dubbed YouCharge (uCharge , iCharge and WeCharge are also feasible). We decided that we can't rely on people to keep our battery filled and a set of solar panels was added.

I provided basic system design in terms of major components required and Derek did some skillful spreadsheet manipulation and timing estimates. Overall we came in just over the small grant threshold. The station will sit somewhere in Rundle Mall and attract people with energy conserving bright colours (as opposed to music and flashing lights) and possibly sweaty gym rats. There will be opportunities to competitively sustain high power generation ( high scores) and have live competitions as a spectacle sport. The data from the generator output, battery charge levels and devices being charged will be logged using an arduino + embedded linux ( let us say hawkboard). This data stream will be published live via city lan and visible  to all.

We are not breaking fresh ground here. Suitable machines in hongkong gym were converted to produce electricity. ABC had a show on PedalPower. In China outdoor gyms with free excercise equipment abound. May be Adelaide can slowly switch from energy hungry fitness facilities to energy producing ones. Adelaide Hackerspace will lead the system integration and we should be ready for the Format Festival next year.

Friday Night SMS - Feasible via Zigbee

One of the new features in the FLOW is the inclusion of a Zigbee modem, instead of the currently prevalent bluetooth. If you get a Overo Fire - it will have a bluetooth on board. A while back we came up with the Friday night phone call idea, routing a call through the wireless of all the unused phones in the area, very useful in crowded club districts.

Voice is a different matter it requires some decent bandwidth, bluetooth can provide it for wireless headsets. The telcos charge exorbinant amounts for the very low-bandwidth SMS services, why ? Because they have centralized user-management and routing systems, they also theoretically have a lot of QoS, security and privacy policies. Yet again in the club scenario SMS is one of the best ways to communicate, voice will be lost in the din and will require the callee to switch location.

Let's consider how we can break the monopoly without paying zillions to licence our own mobile band. Solution will be to build a user maintained/powered/administered zigbee mesh. Zigbee can power itself from energy-harvesting - thumping on the dance floor, peltier sucking off some of the coldness in your beer or the heat in your coffee. We always go over the top in our energy use, it would be nice to channel some of it into free/cheaper communication. The zigbee mesh can take and channel the first hop, suppose the SMS target is beyond mesh reach, what do we do ? We hop on the old faithful - IP.

Before there was internet, there were lots of small intranets. Now we have and 'SMS like' service running over http with lots of users - Twitter seems to have no trouble raising funds. May be it can offer a cheaper solution to all the user to user functions the telco claims to perform. The mesh network links to an IP gateway and the SMS hops onto the twitter channel as a direct message. For that matter any chat engine will do, jabber, msn etc etc, just need to address the target properly.

But at the end someone has to pay the piper (the transmitter of data). Working out who does that and how much is a political issue, but I definitely want a cheaper piper. If energy harvesting lets me sing and dance to send an SMS I will do that.