[Energy] Standardizing pedal power for the occupiers
leftyfb
leftyfb at gmail.com
Tue Nov 8 17:31:38 EST 2011
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can we get a non-broken link or attachment to the diagram? It didn't
seem to come through the email forwarded.
On 11/08/2011 04:54 PM, Farhad Ebrahimi 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
> <mailto: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>
> (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 <mailto: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.*
>
>
> PedalPowerstandards.png
>
>
>
> *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 <mailto:moallem at mit.edu>
>
> http://BlindLead.mit.edu
>
>
>
>
>
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