Charge Your Gadgets by Breathing!

I'm willing to bet that everyone who reads this blog breathes. There's also a fairly good chance that you have a USB-powered gadget...I have about a dozen. So why waste all that energy expanding and contracting your rib cage when you could pump that energy straight into a gadget (or USBCell rechargeable battery)?

Using some parts scavenged from an old CD-ROM drive, some dude at instructables has built a breath-powered USB charger. While he says that it's possible to get 1 W out of the device, he's only seeing 50 mW. Not so great, as it'd take about 24 hours of breathing to charge your cell phone. But let's be frank...you were planning on breathing anyway.

More at Instructables

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Interesting?
written by stands2reason, November 05, 2007

This could be interesting, although I think this is definitely impractical for most USB devices.

A USB socket gives at least 500 mA * 5V = 2.5 Watts, and some dedicated chargers do more. Besides, if you want muscle power, why not use the arms? Although this could be useful for novelty applications (breath-powered flashlight?).

Smart Clothing
written by smwtcool, November 06, 2007

There's talk about smart clothing, you know the kind that has built in sensors or heating elements or stuff like that. Perhaps this would have an application there.