MIT Students Demo Pedal Powered Laptop

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If staying in shape isn't enough to motivate you to workout, maybe working out on an exercise bike to charge the battery in your laptop is? MIT students have come up with a unique contraption that converts the power you generate from riding a bike into energy your laptop can run on.

According to MIT News the so called &quot;pedal-powered laptop&quot; began as a class assignment for an Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering course. Students were instructed to design and build a device that converts mechanical power into electrical power. A team of seven students took an altered exercise bike and made it so pedaling caused a 12-volt car battery to charge. This 12-volt battery then charged a laptop, that was mounted on the front of the bike, via a 12-volt cigarette-lighter adaptor.

The seat on the bike is adjustable for different height people and the laptop mount at the front is adjustable. The student designers found that it was easy to generate 50 watts of power via pedaling at a relaxed pace, which is more power than the 30-watts that's required to power the laptop used in this setup.

I look forward to the day this type of contraption is available. Imagine being in a gym that had both these and LCD TV displays. You could workout, work and watch TV at the same time. Multi-tasking and sensory overload freaks, the future looks bright indeed!

 

 

 

I've often thought about this, perhaps by adapting a treadle-powered sewing machine. The MIT version isn't easy to hide under a desk.

Apart from having the backup power system, the device should stop my feet freezing up in winter if the heating is a bit poor.

John

 

omg seriously i want 2

 

New WOW sessions:

gotta...keep...pedaling. Can't stop. Noooooooooooooo.

 

wowza, those MIT students are dead smart. Good work

 

I would love to have this at my place or even the gym. Having the motivation to keep your laptop going is a good way to get some exercise in

The only thing I would be worried about is the cycles it would put on the battery itself. I don't know how much it would effect it if you're making 35 watts and your laptop is using 50-70 watts. Having in fluxing amount of electricity would force you to keep the battery in since people usually don't peddle at a steady pace.

 

I wonder how fast you'd have to pedal to power something like the XPS M1730.

 

hahaha

this is a very cool experiment.

 

I wonder if any energy would be left to use notebook when legs are hurting busy doing the paddling. And remember the damage keyboard and touchpad gonna get from excessively sweating hand.

 

The ironic thing is that as people get into better shape they generally have less gaming laptop (general stereotype here) and as most people get larger laptops they are in worse shape. Bad news for the gamers.

 

'Both' as in running laptop and LCD TV from 50 watt paddle powered generator? If the idea of this whole project is to conserve electricity, then who is going to paddle for air conditioner and lights inside the facility? The concept simply doesn't weigh in. If one is so power conscious, he should shut down 1 kilo watt air conditioner ~ and its already like 1000 - 50 = 950 watts saving.

 

I think the idea of the project was to get some exercise, not to save energy.

 

Its an innovative idea, and the execution is pretty cool, but its neither practical nor useful. I'd like to see how the mechanics actually work, it'd definitely be interesting to see how they implemented it.

 

Id argue it is useful, maybe not cost effective
for the gym idea, you probably would need several people peddling to power a tv
but to recharge small electronics, aka your ipod while at the gym would be easy a generator that size could be had pretty cheap


albeit when i first saw pedal powered I was hoping this was going to be some information on the sewing machine style pedal for the OLPC

 

I wasn't clear, no one can pedal that hard (or at least would want to for the sake of watching TV). The laptop itself would have to be an ultraportable for this thing to work.

Now, if you had an entire gym full of machines that harness energy I'm sure they could power a few TVs with enough people pedaling hard. A good way for a gym to cut its energy costs if nothing else.

And I agree with most people saying this probably isn't too practical. Although I do have a friend that does online gaming while working out in a recumbent exercise bike, says he does it so he doesn't feel as guilty. Not sure how well it works.

 

People are saying this is impractical - I believe this is engineering! Take any early stage project, and look at how practical it really is? Most things aren't very practical at all. You start with an idea and get it to work, then you make it better (practical) and so forth. This is a great start.

 

i go to MIT! yay! MIT ftw!!!! ok thats enough.

 

Lol you're very smart then. I was rejected.

 

Hmmm.... A human-powered laptop? For some reason, I'm not surprised. It's been done many, many times before, just not with laptops. The only thing they did different here is that they used a notebook instead of some other device to be powered. I'm also surprised that that notebook only need 30 watts of power. Just how old was that thing, anyway?

I noticed that this was for a civil and environmental engineering course. Now I know why everyone makes fun of the Civil engineers here at Rose-Hulman . I mean, I can't see this contraption being used in everyday life. A human-powered vehicle (high-speed areodynamic bike)? Maybe. A Car that gets 100+MPG? In the future, yes. But a human powered notebook? Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty neat accomplishment, but I simply cannot see the practicality of it.

It seems that MIT is pushing engineering to do oddball applications, "because they can". Here at Rose, however, we apply engineering for practical, everyday things.

(The above line is not to be taken seriously. I wrote it only because I go to a school that is considered one of MIT's rivals, so I naturally had to make fun of them )

Reading that article made me glad that I chose Rose over MIT, lol .

 

wow first-year kids did this? MIT students must be brilliant!

 

It'd make exercising more fun, but for FPS gamers, it just won't cut it. It takes some tremendous skill to move your lower body and keep your arms still enough to pull off that AK headshot in CS.

 

Am I the only one that caught that, or am I reading too much into it?

 

I wonder what the budget is that each team receives to actually construct these contraptions.

 

Wow it took 7 students at MIT to come up with this? Kind of sad...

50 watts of power for an hour = 50w/hrs. = 1/2 cent savings on power per hour roughly speaking.

Wouldn't take much... just a cheap gym excursive bike (with a generator built in) and a couple other little mods.

 

Yeah, it is not that hard to build this. Like really easy. All you need is a: DC motor at whatever voltage you need and hook it up to a notebook. That is the simple way.

If you want way over your head, you could use a 3 phase induction motor (or DC motor connected to a battery then pulse width modulator), step up the voltage to 120V (transformer) and then connect it up like a wall outlet.

Or do something like a 12V DC motor with the lines coming out of it to a battery then have a zener diode/resistor combination to step down the voltage with minimum current. Then you could do some series/parallel resistor stuff to drop the voltage down more.

One would have to worry about the voltage supplied to a field windings/stator in the DC motor, or the induced voltage needed for the magnetic fields in the induction motor.

I just wanted to shed some light because I really like this stuff. It just shows what being an Electrical Engineering student is!

 

They could integrate this into health/mana regeneration. The more you pedal per hour the faster you regain vital stats. Only downside to this is you'd end up with a generation of people whose legs are thicker than thier torsos. It'd be like a reverse Popeye.

 

Well, the benefits of this could go beyond merely powering a laptop. Think of mega gyms - rows of people running on treadmills, rowing machines and bikes. If they could harness power from people pedalling, they could use it to offset costs of powering a few lightbulbs. Charge up a few batteries to power some LED lights, you could potentially (in theory) save a small bit o' money that way.

Mega gyms have tons of equipment in there. Sure, the actualy gains right now are marginal at best, but if they some day figure out a way to generate additional energy using such mechnical methods, it could in theory become strangely efficient. A sweaty, odiferous alternative to solar energy.

I think I put too much thought into that.

 

Anyone else reminded of the Lance Armstrong commercial where he is powering the building on his bike?

 

People overseas has been doing it for many many years!

Now MIT finally caught up? LOL

Anyone want my burger?

 

That, my friends, is dedication.

 

That, my friends, is one good photoshopper that I want to meet.