For the kinetic energy project, I’m prototyping a human powered battery charging system. ITP has very long hallways, so I’d like to take harness the traffic up and down the halls to power projects. The end product is envisioned as a monorail tramway type of system. A handle dangles from the overhead tramway, and tugging that handle will pull the tram down the hall, charging a battery as it goes.
The initial prototype won’t be suspended. To quickly mock it up, I’m taking apart a remote control car, purchased at Goodwill, and turning it into a push-charger. The first job is to get access to the geared motor, figure out the wiring and hook it up to a multimeter to check the voltage and amperage generated.
Here’s the car:
And here’s the main body with the decorative casing removed:
The innards with all the radio electronics won’t be needed, so those are removed:
The motor itself runs off two very obvious wires. This is where our electricity will come from:
The top side of the battery compartment has metal tabs for each contact. This is great because we can wire up any number of batteries to charge, from one to six with ease:
Our meter shows around 2.5 volts at normal walking speeds. Amperage seems to be between 30 and 100mA, but this meter wasn’t great for reading that. Whatever it is, this should be enough to trickle-charge a battery.
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