https://open.spotify.com/track/3FtYbEfBqAlGO46NUDQSAt?si=FHyOovzpSYybOyXUjqHs5g
Quick notes on the reading material:
‘Energy Scavenging’ was a fun and light read. It was interesting to see the amount of different approaches to generate energy that we might not think about regularly. Hopefully we’re leaning towards a future where we’re able to optimize these various types of energy harvesting and can apply some of these solutions to power smaller gadgets and devices that don’t require too much energy to function.
One other aspect that stood out to me was the fact that batteries didn’t really evolve in terms of energy density in recent times. We for sure made improvements in energy storage technology, and made our devices more optimized which means less energy consumption in general, but it is still crazy to me how dependent on chargers we still are, and how fast batteries decay,
Regarding ‘Energy Slaves’, I found it really interesting how McMillen converts energy units to human scale. It really makes you think about how we mindlessly consume and waste energy. One detail that called my attention was the fact that an average man can only generate the equivalente energy of 14 liters of gasoline.
It weirdly reminded me of the Black Mirror episode called ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, where people, in a dystopian society, have to cycle to generate the energy they consume, and get ‘credits’ in exchange for their effort,
I feel like the comic is an attemp to turn a big issue visible. This overall invisibility is something that I am thinking more and more about - how certain things with huge impact pass by unnoticed by the majority of people. It also reminded me of the fact that one single line of cruiseships emitts more toxic gasses than all of the cars in Europe.
Updates on the Kinetic Project:
I still need to review the material we went over last week on open/short circuits, rectifying and conditioning, ac/dc, the whole thing. I planned to do it this week, but didn’t have time, but will definitely do it before next week’s class 🫣
In terms of execution, I consulted my favorite electrical engineer at ITP (Jess Shen) and got some ideas from her. I also still need to look into capacitors and how they work - I only want to power my light when I generate enough energy to do so. When talking to Jess, she mentioned that I might be able to use a MOSFET to achieve that. I also wanted to use a classic light bulb 💡for aesthetic purposes, and she reminded me that we have LED ones today that require significant less amount of energy to light up.
I also bought one of the shake flashlights from amazon and intend to use the magnet and the coil in my project. This is how the execution planning is looking so far: