Friday, August 19, 2011

Praxis: Campfire cellphone charger.

From Global Guerrillas comes this link to this story.

The Hatsuden-Nabe thermo-electric cookpot turns heat from boiling water into electricity that feeds via a USB port into digital devices such as smartphones, music players and global positioning systems.

TES NewEnergy, based in the western city of Osaka, started selling the gadget in Japan this month for 24,150 yen ($299), and plans to market it later in developing countries with patchy power grids.

Chief executive Kazuhiro Fujita said the invention was inspired by Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left 23,000 people dead or missing, devastated the northeast region and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

"When I saw the TV footage of the quake victims making a fire to keep themselves warm, I came up with the idea of helping them to charge their mobile phones at the same time," Fujita said.

The pot features strips of ceramic thermoelectric material that generate electricity through temperature differentials between the 550 degrees Celsius at the bottom of the pot and the water boiling inside at 100 degrees.

The company says the device takes three to five hours to charge an iPhone and can heat up your lunch at the same time.

"Unlike a solar power generator, our pot can be used regardless of time of day and weather while its small size allows people to easily carry it in a bag in case of evacuation," said director and co-developer Ryoji Funahashi.

3 comments:

Mickey Collins said...

It's nice, but I'd rather have a hand held generator, something like those hand cranked flashlights.

Bad Cyborg said...

Interesting idea but do you think the cellular networks will survive more than a few days after the onset of hostilities? The loyalists will have the expensive comm gear our taxes have bought for them. They won't NEED cell phones. I also wonder how long it will take them to revert the GPS system back to the pre-Clinton mode where ordinary folks basically couldn't use it for finding anything smaller than a west-Texas county.

Anonymous said...

A nice idea, and I wish him well is selling these handy recharge gizmos.
But will there even BE a cell phone infrastructure after a major (natural or un-natural) disaster?

B Woodman
III-per

wv: riphype - What John Stossel does.