See Note at bottom.\u00a0 Years ago I bought a shake flashlight and it was nearly worthless. I shook it for quite awhile, and as soon as I stopped, the LED went dim.\u00a0 So how am I supposed to shake the light and try to aim it as something that needs light?\u00a0 And if it wasn’t being shaken, it was dim?\u00a0 \u00a0 No way!<\/p>\n
Later I bought a crank flashlight and it used a motor that was identical to the ones in a DVD drive to open the drive door.\u00a0 I believe it used a super capacitor about 1 Farad, but I’m not sure – it has been several years ago. In any case, the flashlight took too much effort and was difficult to charge and it didn’t put out very much light.<\/p>\n
Last year I contributed to a “crowd funding” website for the Gravity Light<\/a>, which uses a bag of sand, dirt or rocks to drive the LED for 20 minutes or so.\u00a0 They have been going through the process of getting the manufacturing prototypes and testing for durability, and they should be shipping one to me sometime soon before February.\u00a0 My thinking is that I can increase the time it will run by two or more times, by using a pulley on the weight and anchoring the rope to the ceiling.\u00a0 The rope path will be changed from an upside down U to an N shape.\u00a0 As the weight is lifted the rope will have to travel twice as far, but the weight will have to be twice as heavy.\u00a0 But sand, dirt or rocks are free or “dirt cheap.”<\/p>\n The technology is somewhat the same but I’m hoping that the Gravity Light will be a lot more successful than the previous mechanically rechargeable lights I’ve had.<\/p>\n Note: I see two distinct kinds of mechanically operated flashlights, but I’m trying to name them appropriately so that the name indicates the type.\u00a0 There is the mechanically operated flashlight, where the light is produced by mechanical motion.\u00a0 This could be a light that operated by the squeezing of the hand, or it could have a spring that is wound up and slowly unwinds generating the light.\u00a0 But the other type is different in that the mechanical action generates electricity that is stored in either a battery or a capacitor, and then this is used to make the light.\u00a0 In other words, the energy is not held in mechanical device but is held in an electrical device.\u00a0 Another part of this distinction is that the stored electric energy may be generated by other means such as a solar photovoltaic cell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" See Note at bottom.\u00a0 Years ago I bought a shake flashlight and it was nearly worthless. I shook it for quite awhile, and as soon as I stopped, the LED went dim.\u00a0 So how am I supposed to shake the light and try to aim it as something that needs light?\u00a0 And if it wasn’t <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flashlight","category-lighting","category-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9040"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9042,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9040\/revisions\/9042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}