Charge up your cell phone while you ride a bike

Motorola rep demonstrates the bike-powered charger

(Credit: AVING)

If you ride your bike to and from work every day anyway, why not charge your phone at the same time? That's the premise behind this cell phone docking station from Motorola that mounts on top of a bicycle. Let your pedals power up your phone battery phone as you swerve around dodging cars and pedestrians. Not only will you save time, you'll help the environment too. Too bad we can't figure out if this will be available here and at what price, but it's a neat concept all the same. Just don't take any calls while cycling, OK?

[via Gizmodo]

[MousesMom]

Now try this with laptops too!

If they can do laptops then you are talking! And why stop there? How many
people have exercise bikes or steppers at home (or even at gyms??)? Why not
create something that harnesses all that energy. Hell - a gym alone should
be able to light their facility, maybe even a/c or heat the bloody thing (or heat
water for the showers?) Now THERE is an incentive to work out hard, so you
can avoid a cold shower later.

Gyms would save money on utilities (you know they will just put this in their
pockets and not lower fees, but hey, its an idea to conserve energy).

I claim my idea if it makes money! LOL

[jameseatspi]

New Technologies

Its amazing how after so long of relying on limited resources and expensive unlimited resources, the nation is finally thinking of new ways to recycle wasted energy. In the future they'll have shoes that charge your batteries/ipod in your hand/ pocket as you walk/run and all kinds of new ideas/technologies. Its exciting to know some companies are pursuing these inventions and accelerating some ideas.

[dmaczka]

not wasted energy

I am all for green solutions to energy usage, however it should be noted that the previous posts that called this "wasted energy" are a bit misleading. I was recently looking for a good lighting system for my bike as I ride to work and back every day and evening and initially wanted to get a non-battery system that used a dynamo to generate power. I found that they weren't very popular and one source claimed that the human body can only generate about 12 watts of power so if you have a 6 watt lighting system have the energy you're generating with your peddling is going to go to the lights, not to moving you forward.
My cell phone charger outputs about 3 watts, so I can imagine charging a cell phone on the bike and not feeling like I was loosing too much speed, but a laptop power supply is generally between 45 and 100 watts, even if only half of that is used to charge the battery that is still far more than a human could produce while peddling, not to mention the primary purpose of the bike, transportation, would be made useless. Of course gym equipment is a different story, the goal there is to get a good workout while staying in one place so all those machines that use belts to generate resistance could just as easily use dynamos and turn that energy into electricity to power the many TVs that gyms seem to have.

[jeroneanderson]

Humans make plenty of power for bikes and dynamos

While it is true that a dynamo uses some power that could be used for moving the bike, 12 watts is far below what any normal human can produce. 100 watts is easilly sustainable for most people in my estimation but may be more depending on the user. See the plot and discussion here http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~et181/hpv/hpv.html which is taken from the engineering college here at Ohio University and was written by one of my mechanical engineering professors to demonstrate the power of the human body for human powered vehicles (HPV)

[dlotti]

Charge up your cell phone while you ride a bike

This firm already sells a bicycle cellphone charger. It can charge anything that usually plugs into a car cigarette lighter socket www.econvergence.net/cyclech.htm