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Sunday, June 29, 2008
i have a project i need help with. here is my idea. as most of you know i ride a pedicab,my pedicab has a headlight,tail lights,blinkers and brake lights. they all run off of a 12 volt battery under the seat. the problem is that i always end up with a dead battery if i dont charge it every other day...suddenly i came up with a great idea. what if i could charge my battery while riding my pedicab. i have seen the lights that rub on the tire and the faster you go the brighter the light gets but i dont think this would power all the lights i have. so anyone out there got any ideas?
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7 comments:
Isn't there a thing when you brake it regenerates power?
hey - while a dyno can power your lights, the problem is all the power comes out of your legs so you probably will wish you didnt have it after all. probably you want to get more efficient lights and/or a larger battery. are your exsting lights LEDs? if they are old-school automotive bulbs then swap them out. if you already have LEDs then you'd have to put a bigger battery.
-dan-
MonkeyLectric
What about using a marine deep cell battery and hook up some sort of solar trickle charger
A guy i work with uses dynamo hub (the same principal as the tyre thing but the dynamo is built into te hub!) it works really well, with minimal resistance but it only powers 1 front light. I guess they do other models though?
Or you could get another battery wired through a switch so that on monday you were charging battery 'A' and Battery 'B' was powering the lights then flip the switch the next day so battery 'A' powers the lights and 'B' gets charged.that way you get a whole days riding to power to use the next day. Downside to this is you have to lug 2 batteries around with all day!
I think there is already enough resistance pulling a pedicab that the addition of a dyno would be noticeable. But then I don't know how big of one you would need for a 12 volt battery.
However, maybe solar. If the cab is covered, you can place a couple of solar panels on top of it and as long as the sun is out, it will charge the battery. Right?
Or a combo of both.
maybe this could help:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/05/solar_tricycle.html
I saw something a while ago that used teh power you generate and turned it into DC, and the guy was sitting ona trainer, powering his laptop from it.
Something like that. Think about the alternator on a car. They're heavy, but easy to spin. It'll put the charge right back into the battery. It may need to spin faster than you're able to crank it over, but it's the concept that I'm going for here.
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