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Typing Recharges Laptops? 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sounds-crazy dept.
TwoSticks writes "Compaq patents a keyboard that captures your kinetic energy. Magnets and coils on each key charge a small battery to augment the big one in your laptop. Standard NYTimes deal: requires free registration. " I'm a bit suspicious but it looks interesting. It might give me an incentive to fix typos anyway ;)
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Typing Recharges Laptops? More

Typing Recharges Laptops?

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  • Check the PTO - it's there! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/srchnum.htm

    Search for that patent num... It's actually valid.

  • The Patent's abstract from USPTO (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A keyboard power generator provides a plurality of keys with one or more magnets mounted thereon. Additionally, a plurality of coils are mounted on both ends of the magnet such that, when the user is typing, the magnet traverses the coils. The movement of the magnet over the coils causes a current to be generated. In one embodiment, one magnet is mounted per key on the keyboard. In a second embodiment, a plurality of magnets are mounted per key to enhance the power generation capability of the keyboard. The currents generated collectively by the keys are provided to a charge pump which multiplies the voltage to achieve a level greater than the voltage level of the battery to be charged. The multiplied voltage is provided to a charging circuitry such as a trickle charger to recharge the battery. In this manner, the more information entered by the user, the more electricity is generated by the keyboard power generator. The energy provided by the keyboard of the present invention can be used to lengthen the operating period of the portable computer, or alternative, can be used to reduce the size of the primary battery so as to result in a lighter portable computer.


  • This keyboard sounds like it would wear out your hands pretty quickly. You have to expend enery to generate electricty, and I doubt you are going to get much energy from a keyboard unless you make they keys very hard to press (or have very long tavel on each key). On a standard laptop keyboard (with almost no travel) I doubt you are going to get more than a few seconds of battery life out of your keystrokes, even if you are typing a huge amount of text all the time.

    Anybody remember those generator powered headlights on bikes? Remember how hard it was to pedal whenever you tried to use it?

    Wasn't there an April fools joke similar to this this year?
  • Yeah, but how much energy do you expend typing on a normal keyboard? Not much I'd wager. Plus you have the added weight of all those magnets to carry around.

    Besides, aren't laptops hard enough to type on as it is?
  • Yeah that was a great April's 1st joke. A friend of mine sent in a mail asking for more information, they sent him out the go faster stripes for his mouse that they were advertising as being free with that recharging mouse. ;]
  • Posted by Musical Saw Geek:

    I'm sure this was one of John Kennedy and Nick Veitch's spoof news items in the old magazine Amiga Computing. There was another one that had a velocity-sensitive keyboard that gave you caps if you hit it harder...
  • Posted by King_Arthur:

    Then they should also invent a screen which recharges the battery by looking at it.
    Maybe a tft photo electronic screen.
  • I'll agree with this and remind people who might be worried that this is an underestimate that 5 Newtons is about 1 lb of force. It's a cool idea, but even when you're clattering along at 60wpm, this is only .06 W while you're typing; and I know that I personally don't spend a lot of time typing a lot at a laptop, I use it more for browsing reports than writing them. All my serious typing is done on a real keyboard, usually attatched to a desktop.
  • But you're already pushing against springs. Less spring, more magnet . . .

    I never could get the generator to stay properly attached; it kept drifting around the mount point . . .
  • I think we can go farther than this. For the sake of argument lets neglect all losses in the system and assume that 100% of the mechanical energy used in typing is transfered back to the system as electrical energy. No battery loss, no line loss, no loss in the mechanical to electrical transform.

    Assuming 5N per key with a key course length of 2mm you get, as you stated, .01J per keypress. Now lets assume that the user types 4 strokes per second constantly (50 wpm) for an hour. That would give us .01J/stroke * 4stroke/s * 360s = 144J of power to the battery. Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power, for an hour of typing this would give us 144/50 = 2s.

    Remember all these parts are lossless components bought at your local theoretical physics store, if you have normal parts you have to subtract for battery and transfer loss.

  • yeah, thats just what i want, 100 or so magnets inside my computer. why not just throw it into an MRI and do some scans on it?

    asinus sum et eo superbio

  • Actually, from what I understand, it would not be bad for carpel tunnel. A heavier touch would probably actually be *good*. If you have a heavier touch, people are encouraged to use the weight of their hands instead of their fingers to push the keys down, much like a pianist does. Pianists, or typists who use old typewriters, rarely or never get carpel tunnel. Of course, I'm no expert. This is just what I've heard...
  • The shoe-generator is a fine idea, but how much can you walk around during a trans-atlantic flight?

    --

  • I don't know if anyone's doing it commercially, but another way to get electrical energy from a keyboard would be to use a piezoelectric polymer film such as PVDF (see http://www.measspec.com/piezo_film.htm). This would be non-magnetic, lightweight, and structurally quite similar to existing membrane-switch keyboards.

    I don't think any finger-powered transducer can generate enough power to even put a dent in the consumption of a Pentium-II laptop, but it might help with a Palm Pilot or other micro-power device.

  • >Pass a magnet through a copper coil. Do you feel any resistance?

    Yes, if the coil is part of a circuit which allows current to flow. A neat demonstration is to hold a copper pipe (essentially a 1-turn coil) vertically and drop a rare-earth magnet in the top. The magnet will take several seconds to fall through the pipe, due to the braking forces caused by eddy currents in the copper.


  • That would be kinda cool. Since all caps is already equated to YELLING then it would seem appropriate. If you are angry and pound out a flaming message it would come out in all caps. If you hit them really hard the point size could go up.
  • Extracting energy from keyboards may not be too far fetched. I have a keyboard from an old 1975 (Xerox?) terminal that uses HAL effect sensors solderd to the kefboard for each key that had a small magnet glued inside. The resulting feel was a very smooth and quiet keystroke. Quite pleasant for the fingers. I would imagine a coil may not have made enough finger friction to notice. It is a fine keyboard and had something like 140 keys and powerd by an Intel 8080 processor with gold connections on everything.
  • My guess is that the idea is being implemented with a goal NOT to be the sole source of charging power for the battery (otherwise why have a battery at all?), but rather to stretch the amount of time the battery can power the notebook on a single charge. This would be similar to the idea of regenerative braking in electric vehicles.

    This does make the mind wander with all kinds of other possibilities. What about capturing the energy of ambient sound waves? Then the swearing and cursing prompted by the Blue Screen Of Death could actually be put to constructive use. ;-)
  • Think of it as more of a "trickle-charge" -- not enough to fully power your laptop, but enough to delay changing batteries. By how much, I dunno -- Using the POOMA method, I'd guess on the order of 15-30 minutes from a few hours of typing.
    Christopher A. Bohn

  • About a forth of the way down this page [slashdot.org] (sorry, no cid link)...

    Keyboard Electric Generators (Score:1)

    by EngrBohn (cbohn@ieee.org) on Thursday April 01, @09:25AM EDT
    (User Info) http://members.aol.com/EngrBohn/
    Actually, the technology to do this exists now. Not enough to fully charge your batteries, but enough to slow down the discharge (how much? dunno, this is a back-of-envelope analysis).
    By attaching small magnets to the underside of the keys, and wires near the keys, then when you depress a key, a small electric current will be induced in the nearby wire. Of course, when you release the key, a reverse current is then induced -- we'd have to use itsy-bitsy rectifier bridges to maintain a positive voltage across the battery terminals, but with IC technology, that shouldn't be hard.
    Of course, you'll have to keep your floppies (and maybe hard drive) away from your keyboard now...
    cb
    Christopher A. Bohn
    Oooh! What does this button do!?

    Keyboard Electric Generators (Score:1)
    by Metiu on Thursday April 01, @04:13PM EDT
    (User Info) http://
    If you really want energy, why not use piezoelectric crystals? They are very sensitive to knocks, and they would work perfectly with my IBM "heavy -foot- touch" keyboard...
    (BTW very good design for the site, it took a long time to build it I guess... looks like there are some very good unemployed geeks out there... hire 'em!)

    Christopher A. Bohn
  • Anyone else get nervous with magnets around storage media? All those magnets for each key sounds scary to me!

    Probably not big enough to harm anything, though...

    - George
  • That's Hall Effect. Guy named Hall discovered/invented it. The HAL effect is when your computer resolves programming conflicts by terminating the users.

  • view the patent (Score:3)

    by MbM ( 7065 ) on Monday July 12, 1999 @09:23AM (#1807010) Homepage
    you can view the patent here [ibm.com]

    http://www.patents.ibm.com/cgi-bin/viewpat.cmd/U S05911529__

    - MbM
  • It's actually slightly better than that. All of the speed controls these days use "regenerative braking" where the force for slowing down is created by drawing current from the motor. Pretty neat little system, the harder you brake the more charging you get, but only up to a point (when the wheels lock).
  • There was the mouse that recharges your laptop this year... it actually had a pretty cool Flash demo of it, where you "drove" a race car around a track and the faster you drove, the more it would charge your laptop...
    Time flies like an arrow;
  • Obviously your not a believer in the mystical healing powers of magnets... Hmmm maybe I should return my insoles with the magnets that make my feet like they are being massaged all day long. Or the copper bracelet with the magnets that is garanteed to add at least 5 years to my lifespan (I think it is two years for the copper and three for the magnets). And I suppose you don't believe that the headband with the magnets, doesn't make my headaches go away, without taking toxic chemicals...

    Ok, I don't believe any of that crap either, but it is amazing what people will believe, even in 1999. It sounds to me that this might be a nice "gimick" that some easily suckered individual may buy into. The same hippy that would buy the headband, bracelet, and insoles.

    Time flies like an arrow;
  • Now I just need to turn the repeat rate WAY up and put a book on the space bar before going to sleep. Voila: All the energy I could ever need. :)
  • This is another nifty marketing idea to take in people who can't do math (someone posted energy calculation below) -*but*- It does remind me of a sketch from an 'ol 2nd city TV show about 'gadgets of the future' with someone in space age clothes typing on an old Royal mechanical typewrite while the voice over says, "In the future, typing apparatus will derive energy directly from your fingertips, allowing one to create documents w/o the need for bulky and cumbersome electronic equipment" (editing is a bitch tho).


    Chuck
  • Getting back towards the subject, has anybody used one of those batteryless torches where you squeeze the handle to light them up?

    I've got one, and it's much more annoying than a Radio/Torch with Solar and Dynamo charging of internal battery.

    I also have about 8 Swatch "Autoquarz" watches (like the Seiko Kinetic) and a Solar Swatch. I have too many Autoquarzes to keep them all running, but I can mostly keep the Solar running just by leaving it somewhere that gets a little sun.

    On the other hand, I had a solar-only radio and had a lot of problems keeping that charged - being able to wind my new radio is a major advantage.

    I guess I'm saying that we should have as many ways to power things as we can think of, so keep the kinetic powering of laptops going, but also work on embedding solar panels into the lid.

    Now if Jade Mountain [jademountain.com] would just help me work out which solar kit I need for my Sharp Actius...

    Kris.

    Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
  • Anyone care to hazard a guess how much energy can be extracted from your typing fingers, relative to how much energy the laptop consumes?


    Sure. This is actually pretty easy.

    • Assume that the force required to press a key is at most 1 N (roughly the force exerted by a 100g weght). More than this and I'm not using the keyboard :).

    • Assume that the keys move at most 1 cm (0.01 m) down when you press them. More than this gets silly.

    • Assume that I hit at most 10 keys per second sustained typing rate.



    Energy per keystroke is force * distance, or 0.01 J. Keystrokes per second times energy per keystroke gives energy per second (or power), which is 0.1 W.


    So, it doesn't look like this is viable unless we have *really* low power notebooks :).

  • Suprisingly enough, of all the magnets that I've collected over the years, the most powerful/size was found inside an old hard drive. There were two of them, and they were for head movement. They were literally cm away from the platters, so as long as they are carefully placed, there isn't much of a problem. The magnet found on many floppy drive motors is suprisingly strong, too. Just so long as it is all shielded, all is well.
  • Be careful. Science has shown that magnets can cause several serious side-effects in laboratory rats.

    Dr. Igor Kreturs:
    "We placed several rats on large five pound magnets for several days. On top of each rats we placed another five pound magnet. In a very short time all of the test subjects developed respiratory problems and motor skill deficiencies. Eventually, every subject died."

    So, make sure you limit your magentic exposure.

    (No rats were harmed in the construction of this post.)
  • Just wondering. :)

    Sorry, I thought I dropped enough clues. Heh.

    Igor Kreturs pronounced: I gore creatures. Ok, so maybe that doesn't work well on those for whom english/'merkan is a second language.

    Maybe I should be less subtle next time. Nah.
  • What I really need is something that will harness the energy of this incessant tapping. Give me some dummy keys or something that I can tap on and I think I could run the entire floor.

    Apparently it burns alot of calories so why not put it to other uses too?

  • Several years ago, the book Synners by Pat Cadigan had a portable computer powered by two electrodes that were inserted into the users body. Kind of like one of those potato clocks from years back. Wouldn't that bring new meaning to those web pages with the "powered by Jolt" gif?

    OH yeah, the book I mentioned was good, I'd recommend giving it a read, if you can find it...
  • Anyone care to hazard a guess how much energy can be extracted from your typing fingers, relative to how much energy the laptop consumes?

    Personally I think this is just a way to get people to spend more on laptop repairs... ("uh-oh, battery's low, I'd better start smacking this thing around!")
  • yes, but is the energy gain worth the additional weight and cost on the laptop? you could have it pick up an induction charge from the 60 Hz hum of the power grid.

    Side note: the energy expended by the laptop when you strike a key is not zero, there is a state change as well as the energy required to process the keystroke.
  • Seems to me that if battery life is that important, and you are looking for a way to recharge it, the keyboard won't quite cut it. How about building a fold-out crank onto the side that attaches to a generator? Then you market it as a laptop/exercise machine. Face it, your average geek could use a little exercise anyway (I know I could) and I'm sure running the crank a few timers would generate a ton more power than the keyboard would. Not to mention how fun it would be to watch someone working that crank when they realized that their power was running out just when they were trying to save that presentation...
  • Ok, so they put a generator in the keyboard. But as much as normal lusers (and all those designers, too) use their mices, wouldn't it be good to put a generator into the mouse? At least, it does not harm if the mouse is a bit harder to move; you'l be steadier on your hand...

    Note: If some company atempts to patent this idea later on, this post may be refered as prior art. This idea should be free unlike the keyboard-thing... Oups, if it isn't allready patented, I mean...

  • Or use my solution... put the laptop in your backpack, and wear that onto the plane. It's a lot harder to steal a backpack most of the time, and most people don't expect a plain old backpack to contain something of such value. ;)

  • And I suppose moving the mouse charges the battery, too? Must be an evil plot to get people to play Pac-Man to recharge their batteries.

  • If they could figure out a way to capture the constant motion of the stylus on a Palm, and given the low power consumption of the things, perhaps then we could enjoy battery-free computing...
  • How much power does it take to run a keyboard? Would this be enough to power the keyboard alone, making it self-sufficient?

  • Already been done. I don't have the link handy, but a person has done something even more impressive than this with a recumbent (2-3 computers IIRC).

  • I think his point was that you might have to
    press the keys down harder for the energy to
    be collected, so is it really worth it...

    -WW

    --
    Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
    When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
  • Reminisce on Art Blakey, Caravan it for the Duke, dance it home for Dennis Chambers and voilà, laptop is charged!
  • Isn't Compaq the company that, on april fools day, announced on their australian web site that they had a mouse that recharged your battery by moving it? Seems we've now found the basis for that joke :)

    Slashdot reference here [slashdot.org]

  • I beg to differ. Laptops can also be handy if you'll be away from home for any length of time, have a national ISP (or at least don't move out of your ISP's area of coverage), and can't live without your Internet fix. :) In particular, if your job requires you to live in a temporary apartment for a while, a laptop may be the way you stay wired.

    Just one thing: if you travel by plane with a laptop, be very careful how you transport it... if you carry it in a laptop case onto a plane, the risk of it being stolen is quite high, and if you pack it in your checked luggage, you run a risk of the screen being cracked, and that is expensive and not usually covered under the manufacturer's warranty. (I learned the latter lesson the hard way -- I was fortunate enough to have purchased a separate warranty from CompUSA for the screen, but the thing's taking forever to fix.)

    One way you might try transport the laptop is to put it in a hard-sided briefcase and stuff clothes around it, then put the briefcase in another suitcase. Alternatively (since briefcases are hard to fit in other suitcases), you could try carrying the briefcase on the plane; it might not scream "steal me!" quite as loud as an actual laptop case.
  • Probably the person who invented it was working for Compaq. The Employee Agreements that you usually sign when working for a big company give any idea you have on company time to the company, and furthermore put the burden of proof on you to prove an idea was developed on your time.

    Generally, if you get some killer idea and want it for yourself or for the GNU community, you more or less have to quit.

    Or don't go to work for a company with such an agreement in the first place.
  • First of all, I Am Not A Lawyer. That said:

    Well, it would depend on the employee agreement, but generally, the employee agreement would lay claim to anything that's developed on company time with company resources, but only that. The trick is in demonstrating that a given body of work was done on your own.

    In the hypothetical example you give, it would usually not be legal for the company to claim the software as its own; and in practice, since CGI development is so radically different from window manager or device driver development, you'd have a decent chance of hanging onto it.

    However, if the distinction is less blindingly obvious, and/or if the employer has a large legal budget, what's legal in theory may differ from what's legal in practice. In short, if you're concerned about who owns your code, try to work for a small company.

    And as for your last point, if the programmer refused to turn over the code, then the company would (if they really wanted it) sue; and if they won, the court would order the programmer to turn it over. I leave the penalty for noncompliance in that case to the imagination of others.
  • Compaq Australia did something like this for April Fools day, a mouse with a 'super conducting generator' in it which charged your battery as you moved it. Even included a little Formula 1 game to help you get the idea.


    This one may be real, given that a patent number is quoted, but then the USA patent system is so crocky, that doesn't mean anything anyway.


    I wonder how efficient this is, what's the ratio of energy gained from magents to the amount of energy required to move your finger to depress the button?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Thoughts:
    • Cranking, like The Windup Radio [windupradio.com].
    • Treadles, like the old sewing machines.
    • Considering where the power goes, a direct windup hard drive.
    • Thermoelectric power from your body.
    • DC by plugging copper and zinc electrodes into a body cavity...

    Enough
  • Anybody who remembers typing on an ASR33 knows how much force you can impart through typing if you really have to. Maybe they put harder springs on these keyboards. :-)
  • since the subject is getting power from every day activities, how about a shoe that generate energy as you walk? I bet this would generate much more energy then a keyboard.

    IMHO the keyborad is the last piece of generating energy, for computer use I think that maybe a mouse or a joystick would generate more energy then the keyboard it self, I could be wrong.

    --
    "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
  • Anybody remember those generator powered headlights on bikes? Remember how hard it was to pedal whenever you tried to use it?

    My generator don't add any noticable resistance at all. If it didn't make an annoying sound I'd never remember to turn it off in the daytime.

    Don't know about your neighbourhood, but in my whereabouts everyone uses the generator kind. I'd really hate run out of batteries late at night, especially since it could get me fined.

    Don't hate the media, become the media.

  • Well, if you're like me, and probably quite a few out there are, you tend to fidget (tap feet, shake body here and there, etc). I read somewhere that a day's worth of fidgeting expends the same amount of energy as 20 minutes worth of walking or something like that.

    So a pedal to exploit the natural tendency of foot tapping (more of a generalized leg up-down piston motion, actually), sounds like a great idea.

    "Stop shaking the floor!" "But, the floor shaking is what's powering the computer right now!" >G.
  • Queue up a bunch of stuff. When boss comes around, send them away. Start typing like mad. Boss thinks you work hard.

    (In a dilbert-like company, of course, and there's lots of those around).

    Serves as a good "boss-radar" too. Listen for the amount of incessant keyboard sounds. If it gets louder and faster, boss is coming ;-)
  • How about taking one of those plastic foot pump thingys from a blow up bed/dingy/lilo and then duct the compressed air through a small turbine which is powering a generator that charges your laptop ? Keep your legs busy through the flight, give you a mild workout and prolong your battery life to boot ( so to speak ) ! Mind you the intermittent whistle of compressed air through the turbine with the constant slow-mo knee pumping might not go down so well with other passengers on an 8 hour transatlantic flight or a tense board meeting ...
  • why not have the spin of the hard disk drive a generator that will recharge the battery?
  • I did some work last year on the same technolgy but for electic card. The concepts are really simple and all you really need are some wires and magnets. Our system for cars was going to add something like 300 pounds to the car b/c of all the magnets etc... You'd think the added weight would be too much for a lob top. I guess b/c their voltage requirements are so small (Compared to an electric car) that their magnets are light enough.

  • Please, I beg of you, do not encourage the loud typers.

    There is nothing more annoying when you're sitting in the school computer lab at 3 am trying to puzzle out a particularly gruelling problem than someone who loves to hear themselves type. They pound away at the keys as loud and fast as possible, convincing themselves that they are cool due to their rapid button pushing skills- nevermind that a trained monkey could do the job just as efficiently.

    These people are second on my list of annoyances only to people who like to hear themselves talk while in line for a club.

    Do *not* give them a legitimate reason for this loud-typing behavior.

    --
    Grouchy and loving it.
  • Professional racing cyclists have been measured generating about 400W of power during a sustained effort, and considerably more for a brief period of time. Obviously, we're not all pro cyclists, but I'd think that even the average slashdotter could easily generate 25W with their legs. (Maybe more after a couple of mints). Doing the same with your fingers is another matter altogether. :-)

    I suspect the experiment at the museum was not working properly, or was badly designed. I remember doing the same thing at a big museum in Munich (forget the name, it was very good though)
    and struggling to light the bulb, despite the fact that I am a reasonably competent amateur racing cyclist. Of course, as soon as I had collapsed into a sweaty heap a five year old child stepped up and started up the TV set, apparently effortlessly...

    Getting back towards the subject, has anybody used one of those batteryless torches where you squeeze the handle to light them up? Those must need a couple of watts, and my little hands got tired pretty quickly. I can't see how typing could possibly generate enough power to have a significant effect on the battery life of a notebook, but I'd love to be proved wrong.
  • This story reminds of some Speed Controllers(Novak?) put into Radio Controlled Cars. When the juice was off, the speed controller would use the electric motor as a un-optimized generator and feed the spikes back into the battery. I think it gave like upto an extra 1 minute runtime on a 4 minute race pack. Every bit counts on that stuff.

  • This reminds me of another Slashdot story - Mouse Recharges Laptops [slashdot.org], which has been invented by Compaq Australia [compaq.com.au]. But it was an April hoax, and unfortunately they removed that page.

    Strange, that this is Compaq yet again...

  • And if your typing slows down to less than 50 wpm, your laptop explodes... *heh*
    --
  • I like the idea of having caps if you hit the keys harder. It's a damned cool idea, as soon as you get used to it, and stop habitually using the shift key, it would it would work

    Picture that in a work environment...

    SMASH-ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka-SMASH-SMASH-SMASH-ti cka-ticka-ticka-ticka-SMASH-ticka-ticka- ticka--
    "For %$^&'s sake do ya have to use so many capitals???"
    - - -

  • Lo battery? (Score:3)

    by Stavr0 ( 35032 ) on Monday July 12, 1999 @09:58AM (#1807057) Homepage Journal
    WARNING: Battery power is low.
    Save all your work now.

    Oh crap!!!

    askjhadslaashkjaasdkhdasasdsdhasdkasdsdajdashasdhd asdashdashshsdahaskdsahksdadsdaskjdaskhsdahsdaksda ksadsdhdashkaskhdashkdsasdahsdakdashshkahjdaskjasd sdflakldfslhjsfadhjlfsdakfdsalkdfsfdslffkdsalksjfk sdfafsdajhdfj;fdsajsdfahjfasd;jsdfa;fsdahsfadhjsdf

    Power has been restored. You may now resume work normally.
    - - -

  • But if I weighed as much as a mouse and someone put a 5lb weight on me.. I think I would suffer also.. lack of movement and being generally squished would probably cause death.
  • the idea is technically sound, if a bit goofy. There are thousands of things we do every day that could be tapped for energy. How about putting a solenoid on the toilet seat? Or weighted pendulums to the outsides of our knees? I hope this guy and Compaq don't end up making any real money off of this, cause if they do, I can see a huge explosion of silly patents in our near future. Not that there's not already a preponderance of silly patents :)

  • You need 10 keypresses to get 0.1W of power for 1 second.

    0.1W of power for one second? Considering that watts are defined as J/T, I think that's a little more information than necessary.

  • No wonder Compaq needs some crazy idea like this.. the CPU sucks energy like mad. It's bad enough that Intel needs to castrate its 25W Pentiums into a 9W weakling CPU just to save energy on laptops. Adding such regenerative "technology" would only add to the already-exorbitant price of the Armada line. All Apple PowerBook G3s use the same CPU as in the desktop line.. the G3 only uses about 5W of power and the batteries last about 5 hours each. Oh yeah, laptops are used for more things than just executive work. I'm a graphic designer and my PB G3/266 is great for Photoshop or Flash 4. However, lately it's been a grand portable Playstation (Connectix VGS) and Starcraft box.. on batteries it tends to last about 3 1/4 hours playing Gran Turismo while hooked up to an S-Video Toshiba widescreen TV

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • Yah, I took apart an old 14 incher. The two magnets would hang onto each other even when placed on opposite sides of my arm. I'm not buff, mind you, but that's still a couple inches. I've gotten some serious bruises from being pinched. They could make my monitor go woozy gwo feet away!
  • does this include the screen, where the stylus creates enough energy torun the device?
  • I think it's fairly high. These researchers at the UofC were trying to find out what height a keyboard should be at and what level was the least stressful on hands and wrists (turns out it is if you put your keyboard in your laptop). They tested everyone from kids to adults and had them tap away. They measured for energy and stress.
    I type at 75wpm on a keyboard (50wpm on an old fashioned manual), but my fingers are always cold!
  • perhaps the next ideia will be put pedals on desktops. ;) a good excuse for the geek that needs to exercise his body and don't want to get off of his computer...

    And I see gangs of geek-bikers with laptops in his bikes... crossing the night...
  • Yes, exactly. I think a better strategy would be to take advantage of the effort expended in carrying the laptop, not unlike the kinetic energy system in a Rolex watch; say, absorbing the energy from the battery through piezoelectric mounts.

    Thoughts?
  • Other people have pointed out that capturing power from keystrokes would not generate much power, but you need to remember that most people aren't going to actually do those calculations, and a commercial advertising a computer that captures power from your keystrokes would sound ``cool'' and ``hi-tech''. It's good marketing.

    Besides, they should be generating power from the movement of a trackball, not the keyboard. After all, most people are mouse-pushers who have never seen a command-line.

  • Estimation (Score:5)

    by amonymous ( 53279 ) on Monday July 12, 1999 @07:58AM (#1807068)
    I'm not going to use a keyboard that requires
    me to apply more than 5 newtons to a key.
    Let's say the key course length is about 2mm.

    That's 10^-2 J per keypress, neglecting the losses
    in transformation from mechanical to electric
    energy.

    You need 10 keypresses to get 0.1W of power for
    1 second.

    Forget about having your notebook run on that
    alone. Keyboard power is somewhere between
    "little influence" and "neglectable".

    Could be more practical for a PDA without a
    hard drive, but then the trend for these things
    is not to have a keyboard at all.
  • So basically we are typing in superfluid helium, to remove friction, with non-metalic super conducting materials, metals aren't as good as other materials for conducting at extremely low temperatures.
    .01 J/keypress * 4 keypress/s = .04 J/s = .04 W
    So in one hour you have saved 144 J where the system, at 50 W, has eaten up 180000 J.
    144/180000 = 8e-4 = 0 because it is insignificant or outlying data and therefore thrown out.
    The amount of energy that would be created is not worth the effort. After 1250 hours of typing you have save ONE HOUR! YEA!

    I can guess Compaqs marketing strategy, "Type for 52 hours and get the 53 hour FREE!*"
    *Test conducted in superfluid helium with special superconduction motherboard.
  • Sorry the strategy is Type for 52 days and get one extra hour FREE
  • We aren't using all of the energy that we could be using. Everytime we lift one of those laptops we put in potential energy. Currently underdevelopement is ways of recovering that energy and transfering it directly to your laptop. All that it requires is for you to DROP it from the height that you lifted it to.
    Yes folks, it's that easy. Worried about not having enough battery power. Just pick up your laptop and drop it several times and your worries about not having enough life in your batteries will just fall away. If it isn't working then throw your laptop on the ground harder, thereby transfering extra KE into the laptop.

    Other technologies coming soon:
    The 5 lb Sledge hammer
    And
    Dynomite

  • Here is an interesting article [computer.org] about doing just that, generating power from your shoes. I believe that MIT media labs has this technology used to power their "wearable" computers. But this could certainly be extended to power an ordinary laptop

    Spyky
  • Here is an interesting paper [computer.org] about doing just that, generating power from your shoes. Here is another [mit.edu]. And another [ibm.com] from IBM. I believe that MIT media labs has this technology used to power their "wearable" computers. But this could certainly be extended to power an ordinary laptop

    Spyky
  • ... except that for the weight of all those coil magnets and circuitry, you might as well just use a standard keyboard and a larger battery.

    What I want is a power generator a-la 'Seiko Kinetic Watch' so that when I get fed up with the idiocy coming out of Redmond (or Compaq for that matter) I can throw my laptop against a wall and it'll charge the batteries...

  • A problem with most current keyboards is that they don't do a good job absorbing the (considerable) energy imparted to the keys. Some of it gets dissipated putting wear on the keyboard, but most of it puts wear on the tendons, muscles, and ligaments.

    Soaking it up in the keyboard is good for the hands. Soaking it up by turning it into juice and shoving it somewhere, rather than flexing and heating keyboard moving parts, is good for a hand-friendly keyboard.

    And as long as you've turned it into juice, why not shove it into the battery. It may not be enough to power your machine, but it might make a noticeable difference in battery life. (And you might be surprised: There's a LOT of power in physical motion, and electromagnetic generators with losses of a few percent are considered inefficient.)
  • It's already being looked at. A recent conference I attended had a (not entirely tongue-in-cheek) discussion on powering some of the new low-drain laptops with various battery-alternatives, including mechanicals such as the wound-spring generators you see in portable radios, or similar stuff with a large weight hung by a pulley from a tree.
  • I think it was Control Data that once used the spin of the disks to provide enough power to write the disk cache and otherwise get the system shut down gracefully in a sudden power failure.

    BIG, HEAVY disks in those days. About the time Cray was just finishing up there before striking out on his own.

    (Part of the trick is to have your write clock come off a servo track and the PLL able to follow it down a few percent as the disk slows.)
  • ...Now lets assume that the system uses a conservative 50W of power

    Good analysis, even if you lengthen the stroke and reduce the key force - I've been using notebooks heavily for at least six years and my typing has evolved to employ *much* less than 1 pound. However, 50W is far from conservative, unless your use of the term was the opposite of the way I interpreted ("conservative of power"). I'm not sure about Intel-based notebooks (well actually I have a good idea, they pretty much suck for power-conservation), but the power manager hardware and software in Powerbooks is able to report the actual power dissipation, and software exists to read it. My current 180MHz 603e dissipates about 18W *maximum*, and typically 10-12W. By spinning down the drive, lowering the backlight, and turning off PCMCIA cards I can get it to 6W and still be able to usefully use the computer for typing. Also, there are considerably more power-saving modes available to PPC chips (603 and 750/"G3") than x86, and they're well exploited by the Mac OS (and to a currently lesser extent, LinuxPPC), so the power dissipation fluctuates at those times when I stop to think (at least while I'm using the Mac OS, which has few background processes - let's remember Compaq's main market is still Windows users).

    So for the power-paranoid user (a journalist, say) who might want to benefit from this invention, assume her notebook commonly draws 10W and her battery normally lasts (*cough*) 6 hours. With the ideal figure of .01W from typing, her battery consumption drops by 1%, so she gets back 1% of 6 hours, or three-and-a-half minutes of battery life. Hmm, might fire off an extra slug to your editor in that time, but it's hardly a major selling point. And that doesn't even consider that few people actually type that much (particularly with Windows or the Mac) that a surprisingly large amount of power is typically expended just paying for DRAM while a notebook is asleep, and that the figures we're using are absurdly optimistic (6 hours, suuuure). In fact, most people use their notebooks plugged-in almost all the time, and the battery is essentially a RAM backup. Until battery times extend by at least an order of magnitude, this won't change.

    If it's not an July Fool's patent, it oughta be.
  • Depends; you could be using a graphics and CPU intensive program set (such as windows) or you could be using a very efficient systen (such as linux) - I have an old Dtk laptop which lasts more than four hours on its batteries in linux but less then two when it still had windows (3.11, albeit) on it. And as you would type more with linux anyways....you may actually get a whole 10 or 15 minutes extra, roughly the amount of time of a UPS. :)
    But from my experience, Compaq makes low-quality, over-priced laptops (you ever used an armada 4120? or a presario, i think its called, 1230? The latter has a benchmark test of 120 MHz, and a 233 MHz CPU...)

    What a better way of recruiting power from laptops may be by putting carpet material on the bottom, and whenever you use it, it converts all the static electricity from that carpet rubbing against your clothes into the battery (god knows its some 50,000 volts :) )
  • Dude - grow up. Strike 1, you're a troll, strike two you're flamebait...you keep going at this rate you'll end up being in /etc/baddies on slashdot...

    Heck, the first time I posted something on /. I was called a troll too (and look how much I've improved now :P ) - and I didn't even post anonymously. There are a lot of better things to direct your complainergy to then to that post - perhaps you should use it to recharge your laptop.
  • Ok, ok...details :)

    We should thus work towards trapping lightning bolts and storing them in lithium-ion filled mountains. :)
  • The mobile PII dissipates around 9W, and the G3 dissipates even less (around 5W if I remember correctly).

    Why does everyone think this is such a bad idea? If you read the PR/patent abstract it says that this is intended to supplement the primary battery - sort of like electric cars that recharge the batteries when decelerating.

    I need all the time I can get when I'm away from home. 2 batteries in my laptop gives me about 5 hours of use, if they can give me an extra hour or so without me having to do anything differently, I'm all for it.
  • No more wasting my time on IRC at work! Now my excuse will be, "I'm charging my battery, sir! I'm saving the company money even as we speak!" I'm sure he'll buy that! =]
  • I like the idea of having caps if you hit the keys harder. It's a damned cool idea, as soon as you get used to it, and stop habitually using the shift key, it would it would work :).
    It might slow typing down somewhat tho :\.
  • Why not put coils of wires around them? These things spin quite a lot right? Certainly it'll make more energy than typing.
    Hell, disk drive plates are already magnetic ;).
    Floppy and Zip drives could harness energy when you add and remove disks.
    Putting tiny solar panels over the little leds on the keyboards and monitors would help too.

    Every bit counts!

    On a more serious note. What about microwave energy? There's already enuff of it around now days, why not transmit energy to mobile devices? Anyone got a working Tesla coil?

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