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Inventor creates solar-powered recharger from an Altoids tin
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Solar-powered recharger and an iPod Touch
Jerome Kelty’s plan to save the planet involves a small solar panel, a USB plug, a battery and an empty Altoids tin.
MacGyver-like, Kelty assembled these parts into his own gadget for charging his iPod Touch using the power of the sun.
“It made absolute perfect sense to me,” said Kelty, of Lafayette, Colo., adding that if the millions of people around the world who own cell phones and other such devices recharged them with solar power instead of fossil fuel-generated electricity, the environment would be better off.
Kelty (pictured below) won an invention contest sponsored by a do-it-yourselfers Web site and an Oakland environmental law firm and could win a future audience with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Earthjustice is a law firm that specializes in pro bono work on environmental causes on behalf of, philosophically, its biggest and only client, the planet Earth. Earthjustice is also drumming up citizen support for improved energy efficiency standards from the Department of Energy for electric devices such as refrigerators, air conditioners, vending machines and other electric motors.
Earthjustice has been encouraging people to contact the D.O.E. during the public comment period on the regulations but then came up with the United States of Efficiency contest idea, said Bill Walker, Earthjustice’s campaign director.
“We wanted to do something that was more innovative, more creative and more fun, if you will,” Walker said. Earthjustice partnered with Instructables.com, a site at which inventors share how they made various gadgets, to sponsor the competition. Kelty’s device was picked as the winner, for which he received a new Apple Macbook notebook computer.
The Kelty recharger only works with iPods and iPhones and he has no plans to turn it into a commercial product, but he made it as a demonstration of what is possible. If everyone who owned the 30 million iPods and iPhones sold to date worldwide recharged their gadgets every day with solar power, instead of plugging into an outlet, 30 million pounds of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming, would not be created.
Kelty got the idea for the solar-powered charger from the Minty Boost, a $20 charger powered by two AA alkaline batteries. It’s called the Minty Boost because it is also housed in an Altoids breath mints tin. But it had its shortcomings.
“The problem is, with an iPod Touch or an iPhone, the battery in an iPhone is so big that it will deplete the batteries [in the Minty Boost] and you’ll only get half a charge,” he explained.
To improve upon the Minty Boost, Kelty replaced the AA batteries with a rechargeable lithium polymer battery and added a small solar panel. The solar panel recharges the internal battery, which in turn recharges the iPhone.
“The idea is that you can leave this out in the sun during the day while you’re using your phone, or whatever device, and at night time, plug your phone into it and you’re good to go,” Kelty said.
There are commercial solar-powered charging devices on the market. A device called the Solio opens into three fan-like blades that house the solar panels. But it costs $100. Kelty made his for $71 but says if he shopped around more for parts, he could have made it for less than $30.
Ever the gadget inventor, Kelty is looking around his house to see what other electric devices he can convert to run on solar power.
“Making a laptop that’s solar would be great especially for some of those smaller netbooks because their power requirements are less [than for a regular laptop],” he said.
UPDATE: A solar-powered recharger for the iPhone could come in handy given reports of a fresh round of complaints from users about poor battery life in the new iPhone 3GS and its version 3.0 operating system.
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