On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:44:56 -0700, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

I'm surprised nobody has made a wind-up cell phone. Besides not
requiring a battery or charger (uses a super-capacitor), it will keep
the chronic talkers in line. Not exactly energy scavenging, but (in
my opinion) just as good.

I have a hand-crank radio/flashlight/charger that can charge cell phones.
The problem with building it into the phone iteself is that it's "too big"
for such a small device.

I've seen small pancake PM motors that are made to be wound up with a
pull string. They're flat, small, and fairly powerful. Most of the
space in the flashlight contraption is in the gears to gear up the
speed. It can be done.

Think of it as a form of hand exercise while yacking on the cell
phone.

Incidentally, I designed, prototyped, but never produced a paper tape
printing pager in the early 1970's. The pager ran on batteries, but
the 1/4" paper tape transport and printing was all wind-up mechanical.
I also proposed a wind-up portable floppy disk drive in the 1980's,
which was summarily rejected by literally everyone as a lousy idea.
Oh, well.

As the drive would have to be connected to computer that could power it, and
the wind-up mechanism + interface would be more complex than a motor -- what
would be the point?

This was the early 1970's. What's a computah? The original pager was
Motorola H04ANC (all germanium). I later hot wired it to a Pageboy I
and a much nicer Pageboy II. This was all before the introduction of
LCD displays on pagers. You either got a blast of tone (tone only
pager), or you a blast of tone followed by a blast of unintelligible
noise (tone and voice). LED displays were around, but between the
logic and the LEDs, sucked far too much power. My wind up mechanism
printed a permanent record of the message on a 1/4" wide strip of
paper. The mechanism was similar to a stock ticker, but much smaller.
The drive was mechanical, but the printing pins were solenoid driven.
The solenoid drivers, idler/capstan ratchet, tone decoder, and timing,
were the major electronics, which ran off 2ea AA batteries. If I had
to include a battery to power the tape motion mechanics, my guess
would be about 6ea AA batteries. While not a totally mechanical
replacement, it wasn't all that horrible for the 1970's technology.


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