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Going Yo-Yo Over the iPhone
Peter Thuvander was so excited over his new iPhone that he designed an induction powered yo-yo charger for it. It charges its lithium ion battery using an OLPC crank. 30 “yo-yo” cranks is all you need to juice up your iPhone which sounds almost too good to be true. Check out the video after the jump.
Designer: Peter Thuvander [ Via: Core77 & Gizmodo ]
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14 Comments »
Brian says
Interesting concept!
zippyflounder says
cute, might get some traction
Michael Wendell says
This doesn’t make sense to me. When you toss a yoyo down, you give it jst enough energy and spin to make it climb back up to you. If we were to place a parasitic drag on it, through the use of a motor/generator, wouldn’t the yoyo itself stop yoyo-ing?
I guess you could throw a lot more power into it when you tossed it downward, but there are probably better way to use your own energy to generate electricity. Take look at the OLPC pull-cord generator concepts for example.
Dr. YoHair says
When you toss a yoyo down, you often put *much* more rotational energy into it than required to just get it to come back up. Modern yoyos have been known to sleep for as long as 18 minutes. Even with great bearings and good balance, that takes a pretty serious throw (>90MPH).
See Don “Captain Yo” Watson’s “Yoyo Physics” pamphlets for this stuff in great detail.
And as long as it still sleeps (even with the drag) for more than 15 or so seconds, you can still throw “old school” string tricks on it (say, “Split the Atom”).
To really acquire some current, though, I suspect he’d be better off balancing it for “looping” rather than sleeping; if you check out “2A” yoyo players, they’ll keep the thing in motion for a long time without catching and have a lot of fun with it.
Nicholas Sherlock says
An iPhone battery stores about 20,000 joules of energy. If you pedal on a stationary bike, you can generate power at about 100 watts, that’s 100 joules of energy per second. So, you could charge your iPhone battery up with 200 seconds (over 3 minutes) of pedalling on a stationary bike.
I have a very hard time believing that you could generate the same amount of energy by throwing a yo-yo 30 times!
Mr. Glitters says
I would love to get that iYo!
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