[Energy] Standardizing pedal power for the occupiers
Noah Vawter
nvawter at media.mit.edu
Tue Nov 8 18:36:06 EST 2011
(apologies if this is duplicated)
http://pedalpower2thepeople.pbworks.com/
I put it together this evening and seeded it with some of the recent information that's been going around.
Please join!
On Nov 8, 2011, at 5:56 PM, Amos Blanton wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Timothy Robertson <tim_r at mit.edu> wrote:
> Amos,
>
> I really enjoyed the diagram. I would like to suggest that the other members of the group start taking photos and writing down their notes. Not that we necessarily need documentation, but it would be great to have images/notes for websites and future members to learn from.
>
> Absolutely. Should such things live on a wiki? Occupy Boston's? One could imagine having a page that lists all the various resources and docs related to pedal power would be useful.
>
> Also, I meant to copyleft the diagram and will do so soon so it can be refined by anyone.
>
>
> Hi y'all --
> Have any occupations other than Boston and Wall Street been in the loop with this pedal power group? If not, I'd love to volunteer Boston's InterOccupy Communications working group to take point on disseminating materials like Amos' diagram to other Occupations around the country/globe/solar system/etc.
> Thanks so very much,
> -- Farhad
>
> I don't know how much interconnection has already happened - I think Ted would be a good one to ask. As for disseminating, please go ahead.
>
> -Amos
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Tim
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Farhad Ebrahimi <yahktoe at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi y'all --
>
> Have any occupations other than Boston and Wall Street been in the loop with this pedal power group? If not, I'd love to volunteer Boston's InterOccupy Communications working group to take point on disseminating materials like Amos' diagram to other Occupations around the country/globe/solar system/etc.
>
> Thanks so very much,
> -- Farhad
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Ted Moallem <ted.moallem at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> For the bike and motor-mount hardware, we basically want to replicate
> Pedal-a-watt generator design (http://www.econvergence.net/electro.htm), but with a price tag that's a lot closer to FREE.
>
> OccupyWS sustainability group and TimesUp! are building similar contraptions, but they have an actual budget and sense of urgency, so we should probably simplify construction more than they did.
>
> Does anyone happen to have a Pedal-a-watt stand (or the gaming equivalent) that we could use as a model?
>
>
> Amos, the diagram looks great. Let's arrange a time to get together with Noah Vawter and anyone else interested to put together a circuit design. Some of this can probably be simplified, at least initially --- e.g., with a clean 14v supply, we could power batteries directly and monitor charge level manually.
>
> Ted
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Amos Blanton <amos.blanton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here are some thoughts on strategies for standardizing / improving our pedal power infrastructure.
>
> TLDR; Use 12 volt cigarette lighter sockets / plugs as a standard interface, focus engineering efforts on making a cheap open-source power regulator that lots of different pedal generators can use.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> This diagram breaks things down into two categories: supplies and loads
> Supplies are things you can plug stuff into to get power: generators (pedal and wind), and power / battery packs. Loads are things that use the power they supply.
>
> It would be useful to declare some standards - 12 volt being the first one. One could imagine a scenario where all the occupies agree on a standard and an interface for things that create power and things that use it. If OWS needs more power for an event, Boston can send them a few of their generators for a couple days, and / or vice versa. You get all kinds of emergence and unexpected benefits when you standardize the interface as a constraint and then let people innovate what's behind it.
>
> If we're using 12 volts, then we might as well use the cigarette lighter plug as the interface because there are lots of things that work with them out of the box. Aside from the many cell phone chargers, usb octopai, etc, you can get for your car, there are also a lot of cool electrical things made for RVs and boats, like coffee pots, slow cookers, refrigerators, and what have you. And marine grade 12 V cigarette sockets / plugs will actually lock in place.
>
> This approach suggests we should focus our efforts in two places.
>
> 1. Make universal power regulators that can be used with (almost) any pedal generator
>
> It doesn't take a deep understanding of electrical engineering to make a pedal generator: you just have to figure out how to turn a motor backwards. The difficult part is what to do with the unregulated, dirty, DC electricity that comes out of the generator wires in order to make it consistent, safe, and usable, so it can interoperate with all the things we might want to connect it to. Once a cheap power regulator is designed and made available, lots of people can then make pedal generators. They can order the assembled power regulator from sparkfun, or DIY it from plans made available, and then they're golden: hook up the two wires from the generator to the in, and then hook up the two wires for the out to a cigarette lighter socket. It doesn't matter that their generator looks or works differently than all the rest, as long as the output conforms to the standards.
>
> A thumbnail first draft of a spec for the power regulator:
> Contains a bridge rectifier so you can't pedal backwards and generate negative voltage
> Takes in power ranging from - 30V to +30V and consistently outputs clean 14.5 volts ( which most 12 volt things can accept, and the extra couple volts are useful if you are charging a battery pack)
> Consider using a largish capacitor so one can slow down pedaling or even switch riders for a second and still put out consistent power.
>
> 2. Build Power packs with charge controllers
>
> 12 volts won't travel far on a wire without losing its oomph, and we can't put generators everywhere. So that means we need portable power packs to distribute power to where its needed on site. Batteries need charge controllers with simple interfaces to be usable by the masses. They should prevent over charge or undercharge, and they should tell the user when they are being charged or discharged, and approx. how much juice they have left. And it should make difficult to lick the terminals or short the leads, or otherwise do something dangerous.
>
>
> User Stories:
>
> Here are some user stories of how I could imagine this working as we scale up:
> The cook notices the light is getting dim, so the next morning someone takes the power pack to the pedal tent, where they charge it for an hour or so. They bring it back, plug it in, and the lights are good for another few days.
> One of the people in the media tent needs to work on their laptop all night, so they go the pedal tent and "sign out" a power pack and and AC 120 volt inverter (and possibly leave some kind of collateral). The next morning they return both to the pedal tent coordinator, who places the power pack in the "dead" queue. Legions of healthy young pedalers stop by throughout the day and charge it and the rest of packs back up, under the watchful eye of the coordinator / pedal power team.
>
>
>
>
> --
> ________________________________
>
> Theodore Moallem, Ph.D.
> moallem at mit.edu
>
> http://BlindLead.mit.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Tim Robertson II
> MIT 2011
> Mechanical Engineering
>
>
>
Noah Vawter
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter <- Media Lab documentation
http://exertion.pbworks.com <- Ph.D. research
http://Synthshopping.com <- My commercial wing
http://kaptheshampoo.com <- webcomic
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