6:28 That's because the piezo was mounted to move with the machine, it isn't experiencing any forces besides those wires' inertia, which are probably the source of the voltage. A better way would be to mount the piezo on a fixed object and attach a stick to the washing machine with the other end going to the piezo, so that the vibrations are making it flex. Please try this again, I think you can achieve way better results with the piezo method :D (better ways in the reply section)
It would have to be tuned...but the audio output could then be fed thru the bridge rectifier..the problem is you have to have a pretty wide band antenna to pull in the RF energy
@@youssefaly97 practical ? possible yes, practical no. practicality and possibility are different. It is possible for me to walk 30 km from home to work, but it's just not practical.
The storage capacitor's leakage / equivalent parallel resistance also plays a large part in how well your energy harvesting system will perform. Even if the Rleakage is in the megaohm range this becomes significant at these power scales. If anyone wants to seriously play with energy harvesting make sure you dive into the datasheet for your capacitors and get low leakage caps.
After checking the video, it indeed says _"never forget the spoon"._ I was about to edit the quote but I'd rather leave the mistake up and shame myself.
Please add one more topic to your backlog: energy harvesting modules. The thing is almost no energy sources may be used directly without any conditioning. There are specialized modules for piezo elements, for energy harvesting from tiny solar panels and so on. With such circuits your device can harvest even tiny short-living bursts of energy, effectively conserve them in a battery and provide later when needed to measure and send the data. Very rarely you can also see circuits without an energy buffer, the most notorious example of such approach is EnOcean kinetic harvesters built into wall light switches. Patented and probably the only of this kind. Also there is a lot of relevant research papers on the topic. Such papers often list comparison tables for different energy sources: energy density (size to energy ratio), efficiency, typical energy output and so on. I would love to see such data in the video. Sorry. I was working on the energy harvesting and energy saving methods for my master's thesis, that's why this video triggered me so much. Thank you for your videos!
I feel ya it triggered me a bit too and I don't even utilize energy harvesting for my work. Though to be in the spirit of the video ultra capacitors would be better than batteries as the purpose was to eliminate the battery and its life expectancy problem. Though im sure there are plenty of batteries that would work just fine for that sort of application. IDK you would know better i'm just a robotics guy.
Really loving the "high production value" your videos are having. Everything is very well done. Even the introduction is made carefully. Loving the content!
Out of all the things in this video, you noticed that "smiling DC". I don't know if that makes you well observant or someone with a short attention span. It made me chuckle a bit.
If you're really interested in this a fun craft to do is to wire up some small piezo discs to an led inside the bottom of a shoe and watch it light up as you run. The amount of energy you get out of the piezo disc is really small though I think the results of a road version would be pretty disappointing :(
Steve Mould has a great video about the piezoelectric effect and why it happens based on the crystal structure/lattice of molecules that make up the thing being shocked/compressed and expanded. Think it makes sense that it wouldn't be a ton of energy when you watch that. Sure lots of energy from the impacts is lost to deformation/heating of the element and subsequent sound waves etc. so wouldn't think much of the actual energy goes into ends up in electrons flowing through the output wires.
You have a chance of increasing rolling resistance, and that would be undesired. Besides, tires tends to eat into asphalt, so a no telling how long a piezo-surface would last.
@@erlendse yah basically same problem with solar roadways roads get replaces because they undergo a lot of wear over time, thunderfoot did a few "debunk" videos on why it's just a bad idea
Brother i was watching all of your videos. But few months ago I left watching. Now i m back and enjoying again..THANK YOU for your efforts and lot of knowledge
@@dogwalker666 ah a spring...yeah that would work too...the ball would move to the vibration and the spring would translate that vibration into the piezo plate, I was thinking maybe a fixed arm, but the spring would probably be better even though it might lose some of the movement due to damping
You'd think that, but some solar calculators actually have fake panels in. It's cheaper to fit a tiny button-type battery than to fit a solar cell. The battery will run flat, eventually - but a calculator chip draws in the micro-amps when sleeping, so that battery will last a few years. Long enough that the calculator is probably long lost, and if not the owner will just discard it as faulty.
I'd love to see you cover an RF wake-up system for IoT. Receiving RF transmissions can be rough on the power budget. If you use timing to know when to wake up and Rx, you need a RTC and wake-up interval short enough to prevent losing sync. A wake-up system is a passive (or *extremely* low-power) circuit tuned for a signal at a particular frequency, which can serve to wake up the main microcontroller/receiver. This allows you the flexibility of broadcasting the wake-up signal whenever you want, followed by transmission of your regular data payload. The connection is that passive wake-up circuits are essentially a special case of RF energy harvesting, which got limited coverage in this video.
rx'ing a wireless signal doesn't use much power. You only really need power to demod and interpret the signal which can realistically be done with a low-power mcu. It get's more difficult with protocols like wifi since they require a response to a request e.g. tx'ing some data and that's where you have your high energy consumption up in the 100mW's. BLE solves this by reducing the data rate thus allowing for lower tx power and reducing the number of transmissions e.g. not requiring a response every 0.1 seconds and being ok with several seconds between transmissions.
@@web1bastler I mean, something like a nRF24L01+ draws 7-11 mA during Tx (depending on output power) and 12-13 mA during Rx. A CC2652R draws 7-10 mA during Tx, and ~7 mA during Rx. Other chips are broadly similar. Rx can be deceptively bad though. Tx you can often wake up, scream into the void, and then go back to sleep. With Rx, you may need to *keep* powering the receiver until you either A) hear something or B) time out and give up. That's where a RF wake-up system really helps.
They often use this thermopile on the pilot to keep the gas valve open. If the pilot goes out, the generation stops, the valve closes, and you don't get a gas leak.
@@beware_the_moose Did you maybe confuse Technology Connections with Steve Mould? The latter one published a video about thermocouples just two weeks ago.
Fun fact: Piezoelectric Effect is the ability of certain materials to generate an electric charge in response to applied mechanical stress eg: piezo disk . The word Piezoelectric is derived from the Greek piezein, which means to squeeze or press, and piezo, which is Greek for “push”.
6:28 When we hit the piezoelectric disc both side of the disc experiences am impulse... But in case of washing machine it does not experience any impulse as the other side of the disc is not hitting and surface to experience a normal Reaction force... I suggest to place any another still object touch the exposed surface of the disc so that the disc can experience a normal Reaction force... Or also we can also attach any other heavy object directly to the other side of the disc which will actually result in applying Normal reaction force die to increased Inertia. Anyways loved your beautiful efforts for us to gain some brilliant knowledge while we are at home safe.😊
I know someone who is doing reaserch in RF harvesting at my university and the upper limits are something around -35 dBm so about .3 microWatt, this can definitely be used for some aplications like sensors. Usually low powered systems like the ones show use a halve wave bridge rectifier consisting of a single diode that has a forwars voltage of less than .1V the system shown whas definately not optimised for this. Even if the full wave sounds cooler and get more energy usually in low power systems higher voltages are more preferable so halve wave rectifiers are used. The IOT system requirements were way to high, you could have a protocol like BLE take 100 micro seconds to send a message so it would take less than 200 micro seconds while consuming 10 mA definately not one whole second.
About 40 years ago I was told of someone who lived about 800 yards from a long wave transmitter and using copper bars in his roof harvested the energy. The story goes that he was found out because people complained about the dead spot he created behind his house. How much of this is true I don't know, it came from someone I had no reason to disbelieve and we did have loose links to the Home Office department that would have investigated it.
@@twotone3070 First, if you consider RF harvesting as a means of getting free energy to save in the electricity bill, it's stupid because it would take millions of years, or more, to pay back the materials and equipment needed. The ways I see to reduce RF in an area is by blocking the line of sight with a wall or a metal mesh or more feasible by generating noise and interfering the signal so the receiver can't recieve correctly the original signal. It could be also possible to reflect the signal so that you have multipath propagation and generate echos that would interfere but don't know if this would be possible.
On the washers unit you would probably have to get to the bracket on the inside away from the spring so it's attached to the most vibrating part of the machine bracket so it will have more effect that be near the bottom of the washer where the spring connects to the agitators bass and I'll be where the machine shakes the most inside while it's on spin cycle and all the other Cycles
@@greatscottlab Und bedenke auch, dass jeder Piezo seine individuelle Eigenresonanzfrequenz hat. Diese dünnen Piezo-Scheiben sind für hohe Töne optimiert. Wenn Du langsamere Vibrationen effizient "harvesten" möchtest, dann muss der Piezo anders geformt sein. Letztendlich funzt es am besten in Verbindung mit einem passenden Reonanzkörper und einem aufs Gesamtsystem abgestimmten Gewicht. Deine Piezo-Scheibe würde wahrscheinlich wie verrückt "abgehen", wenn Du sie an passender Stelle auf einer Geige befestigen und den passenden Ton spielen würdest. Die Waschmaschine vibriert dafür viel viel viel zu niederfrequent. Beim Befestigen an einer Geige müsste noch der optimale Punkt gefunden werden, wo das Gehäuse die maximale Schwingungsamplitude aufweist. Ganz so einfach ist das alles also nicht, mit Piezos. Aber wenn man es richtig macht, dann bringen die ordentlich viel.
@@laxmiibhele8376 Sorry, please use a translator, like www.deepl.com My comment was more a hint for GreatScott himself and my english ist not so good for complicated technical topics. It's allwas better, a commentator writes in his own mother language. Who wants, can use a translator, or even integrate it into his/her browser. The result of such a translation is surely much better, compared to my weak english. :-)
As a rf engineer it would be quite interesting to try the rf method again but with a little help to find the right frequency for your area. If I find the time to test it myself I will send you the the video of my results. Tv broadcast signals are pretty strong and annoying for us, so using these might work.
I think it would also be important to pair the harvesting circuit with a suitable antenna! Surely a big antenna on your roof pointing toward the transmitter and designed for those frequencies would be worth a try
Great video! I've been reading about the advances of low energy harvesting via radio frequency through iot devices through university papers published online for a while and this video is a good compliment to those papers. Thanks from America!
9:00 Did you see things for phones, that blinks when you receive a call? IIRC these things didn't use batteries. I had one in transparent case, no batteries Sadly, these isn't longer produced
You could try a single diode rectifier in order to reduce the other 3 diode voltage drops. Also, you could use the Joule thief I think you already covered in your videos to boost the voltage obtained from low signal harvesters.
A simple experiment for the piezo: add a bit weight to the "free" side of your piezo. Inertia will add more push/pull forces and you'll get higher voltage out.
I was hoping for an RF harvesting example, I saw that you can get battery-less bluetooth tags and was amazed that you can actually get some data back. I think there was even plans to develop sensors with power coming from RF power harvesting.
About harvesting from mechanical vibrations You should anchor one of the sides of the piezo to a fixed surface , by doing so you drastically increase the amount of energy transfered to the cristal
Ah another thing , you should consider something like idroelectric generators connected to your water implant , so that the pressure of the water charges your battery
Stick 10 kilogrammes of powerful neodymium magnets on the drum (no clothes in the drum!) . Build coils around it. Run the motor of the machine (typically 300 watts). I bet you'll get more than 300 watts out using up to 10 kilogrammes worth of strong magnets. Free energy is a piece of piss
A better way for the piezo: mount to vibration source near edge, add small weight on point far away, so flexing occurs during vibration. Best to have a mechanical resonance effect to drive piezo with big amplitude.
Some examples of energy harvesting powered devices: Shake powered flashlights. Windup radios & flashlights. Shoes that light when you walk. Self winding watches. Yo-yo w/lights. Many toys w no batteries but still light when rolled, dropped, shook, etc.
For vibration, maybe attach the piezo to a stationary fixture and attach some rubber cushion to the washing machine and let it hit the piezo when it vibrated.
There's a lot of research going on in RF harvesting and I saw some very good demonstrations, and there's also biological energy harvesting for bioelectronics and implantable devices.
About mechanical energy harvesting: i once saw an interesting but probably too expensive concept. some sort of windmill generators in the middle of the highway, that would spin around because of traffic going both ways. Best for roads with a lot of cargo trucks
you can actually harvest a very tiny bit of energy using radio waves. you can build a am radio which works just only on the power provided by the signal and produce sound. look it up it sure is a thing. please make a house tour pleaseeeeeeeee
For RF frequency energy harvesting, the easiest is an crystal AM radio. When I was young, tuning into one of my local radio stations at AM600, there was enough DC energy to power a mechanical meter and even a real headphones. The normal super efficient crystal radio earpiece wasn't necessary for that particular radio station. At my last house, the mains 60Hz was easy to harvest, though, I had 250kv lines a block away from my house running in parallel. 1 good solid beam of metal plus a connection to an earthing GND was enough to illuminate LEDs.
Add a small weight to the other side of your piezoelectric disk and tune your antenna and RF circuit to 2.4 GHz. The disk will not experience much force no matter how hard you vibrate it without some inertia to act against. 2.4 GHz is not only the most likely noise to be found, but cheap commercial circuits and antennas that use it are very easy to find and it propagates quite far.
This would be awesome -- Energy Harvesting -- Small Wind Turbines for: Portable Personal.. Wearable Handheld Lager portable unit to carry to any desired location. Devices that mount to bicycles, motorcycles, cars, etc. In windy places & while physically moving through the air, one could get a little fan or turbine moving pretty fast. Enough to charge a cell phone for example.. Or more. One often missed easy to find windy location is right next to or on top of tall buildings. Such buildings literaly create their own wind.
You need big antenas and grounding to harvest micro watts. And if you have something that can be powered with that tiny amount of energy, it would last decades with a single button cell. It’s not practical
For those considering the piezo method, in addition to the comments below about method of attachment, keep in mind that the charge and discharge rate of a capacitor is directly proportional to both the value of the capacitor and the resistance (effectively r x c in seconds). You could utilize this by having a fairly large resistor connecting the capacitor with the circuit you want to power and some sort of switching circuit that switches the capacitor between your charging and discharging circuits
Note: RC actually gives you Tau, which can be used to calculate charge and discharge rates, but the point still stands, the larger the resistance and/or capacitance, the longer it takes to charge and discharge
For the vibration one, a good idea would maybe be something like a small weight haning above it, and as soon as the whole thing vibrates, the weight will hit the piezo crystal.
I've heard of the RF energy one, I'm an amateur radio operator and have an antenna that is resonant on the HF bands. Over the course of a few days you can get enough energy to power an LED briefly, but yeah definitely not the best source of power. However, you are close to a station that is putting out several kilowatts of RF, then it could be possible. Hope this helps, love the videos and keep up the great work!!
@Lassi Kinnunen Yeah that's true, but that's mostly just direct electric transfer like a transformer. Still could be a neat concept if it wasn't so dangerous and illegal lol.
Nice video! For greater efficiency try to increase the oscillations of the piezoelectric. Attaching it somewhere is not enough, there must be good relative motion between the sides and the center for a greater deformation and thus energy output.
You can easily calculate a spring damper system that maximizes its output amplitude when stimulated with the input frequency of the washing machine. If you attach that to the piezo, your power output should be a lot higher.
One thing I saw once on UA-cam: the guy put LOTS of peltier modules around a barbecue grill (on the outside, of course) and used the energy to move a motor which rotated the meat. Anyway, I think it's a neat idea. You can make food while working with electronics... It's the best of the 2 worlds. 😬 Stay safe there! 🖖😊
What you can also do is harvesting magnetic fields around cables that carry a high current. I have a screw driver with a built in led that lights up when it gets around 10cm next to cables when they carry energy. Would also be suitable for factories or homes
For the piezo, hang a hammer (or something else with some mass) on the side of the washing machine, with the face of the hammer contacting the piezo. Then you have some actual pressure on the disc when the washing machine vibrates.
So, this is particularly interesting to me. I did an entire year long project with a major international contractor to focus on energy harvesting on rotor aircraft with Piezoelectrics. We figured out that it is "technically" possible, but the problem came down to cost and the rather low output power just due to the terrible efficiency of direct mechanical to electrical systems. Very cool video regardless!
i always think of a "sound" harvester, maybe in factories/places where there is a continous noise. I thought of a vibrating sheet with resonant frequency of the most intense audio noise frequency that hits a piezo. Never actually done it but in theory this should do a good job
I would have been curious about the amount of energy you can get from sound. Especially to be able to send the link to people asking me the question quite often.
@@FavoritesAG well, actually i've only found some videos (well made) on the subject and some papers on google scholar. If you search "sound energy harvest" and "Determination of the appropriate piezoelectric materials for various types of piezoelectric energy harvesters" you will find some interesting researches on the matter
A great application for energy harvesting would be to use it inside these super cheap 2$ solar garden LED lamps. They have a single small NiCd battery inside them, and a tiny solar cell. I would live to cheaply hack one and put an ESP8266 inside it that gets powered as soon as an IC somehow detects that the battery is charged enough to sustain reading a sensor, connect to WiFi and transmit an MQTT message. But sadly, I haven't found a super cheap way to do that yet. Any help appreciated! I think it would be awesome to be able to use these 2$ solar-powered waterproof enclosures as IoT sensor nodes - either using Wifi or LoRa.
re: RF harvesting. Need WIDE-BAND reception. Need to use Germanium diodes (1N34) like Tate Ambient Power Module. Need a really good ground connected to the negative side. Iron plates are buried in the ground. The antenna is a LARGE isolated capacitive structure to receive incoming cosmic rays, particles from the Sun, etc. A high antenna is better but more dangerous. Need spark arresters. The antenna can feed a large inductance coil and small value capacitance have less dampening in the oscillation. Tune for 100khz to 300khz -- lightning strike frequencies around the planet.
For things like motors (including your washing machine) that rotate at a set frequency you could use a weight attached to two springs, setting it's natural resonance frequency to that of the washing machine. This would create a positive feedback moving the weight back and forward. If that weight was now a permanent magnet, and you surrounded the 'harvester' with a coil, you could generate an AC current. A bit more faff that a piezo disk, but would probably produce much more power. I guess such a harvesting device would be the exact opposite of mass-tuned damper.
Take the humble inductor as a generator coil in the standard rotor of magnets and stator of coils assembly. Lenz's Law is the bottleneck. What is the formula for the rise-time of an inductor (our generator coil) : T = L / R If we increase the inductance (L), we increase the rise time and so retard the opposing magnetic field, Lenz's Law works but its effects are delayed. Doing this negates the 'push' on an incoming magnet and negates the 'pull' as it passes the inductor centre. This effect is stackable but only works within a small phase window, explore it :)
A magnet and a coil coupled to the washing machine shock absorber promisses far more usable quantity of elecricity than even a specialized thick wide piezoelectric transduser.
I think RF is a good idea for wireless power transfer. Design a transmitter to transmit power to wireless sensors and you never have to change batteries. RF can transmit through walls, etc. and you could design different sensors to operate with different frequencies so you could choose what to power by only transmitting at those frequencies.
the RF one could work at tiny power levels, but you would need to match the circuit to the antenna, and a local Radio station. not a lot of power, but that's how crystal radios work, so it does work at tiny levels.
I observe that almost all energy harvesting comes from something that is plugged in, so you can just as well also plug this device in. Also, batteries and capacitors have a limited lifetime.
6:28 That's because the piezo was mounted to move with the machine, it isn't experiencing any forces besides those wires' inertia, which are probably the source of the voltage.
A better way would be to mount the piezo on a fixed object and attach a stick to the washing machine with the other end going to the piezo, so that the vibrations are making it flex. Please try this again, I think you can achieve way better results with the piezo method :D
(better ways in the reply section)
@@lorenzo5390 Hmm, big voltages :D
Jk but isn't that how those piezo strikers work?
I was about to say the same. You can get much better results if you attach it to a separate object
Mounting a weight on the other side of the piezo should also work because of inertia.
@@theonetribble5867 thats a neater solution:-)
Why not simply put the piezo under one stand of the machine, or better use 4 piezos for each stand?
Radio frequency energy harvesting can be seen in a crystal radio!
It would have to be tuned...but the audio output could then be fed thru the bridge rectifier..the problem is you have to have a pretty wide band antenna to pull in the RF energy
Brian C my point is just that RF energy harvesting can be practical
Brian C my point is just that RF energy harvesting can be practical
@@youssefaly97 practical ? possible yes, practical no.
practicality and possibility are different. It is possible for me to walk 30 km from home to work, but it's just not practical.
Malik maybe practical with PIN diodes, needs more testing.
The storage capacitor's leakage / equivalent parallel resistance also plays a large part in how well your energy harvesting system will perform. Even if the Rleakage is in the megaohm range this becomes significant at these power scales. If anyone wants to seriously play with energy harvesting make sure you dive into the datasheet for your capacitors and get low leakage caps.
Why aren't you making any videos? I'm starving for your content as well!😭
I learned a lot from you, sir. We miss your videos.
And it looks like the larger cap/battery you are using, more leakage happens.
OK
Did I just come to the smart side of UA-cam?
Cuz these are some good ideas. I normally end on the weird side
The radio frequency harvester doesn't work because many people forget the most crucial part, the spoon. Don't forget the spoon.
Never forget the spoon :-)
After checking the video, it indeed says _"never forget the spoon"._ I was about to edit the quote but I'd rather leave the mistake up and shame myself.
Of course Scott didn't know that because he doesn't have google glasses and lab coat
@@realdragon or solve rubik's cubes
Ah! Darn! I used a ForK!!!!!
*"THERE IS NO FREE ENERGY!!!!"*
Wait, wrong channel
F U L L
B R I D G E
R E C T I F I E R
@@nox_chan I like that guy . Hopefully he is still ok
there is though. there is just no perpetual energy.
@@nox_chan
E V E N
F U L L E R
B R I D G E
R E C T I F I E R
boocraftgaming
T H E
M O T H E R
O F
A L L
R E C T I F I E R
I pay zero for my electricity.
BeCaUSe I HaRvEsT mY EnErGy frOm my nEiGhbOuRs
Gamer moment
I too pay zero for my electricity, but I usually have one or two digits in front of the zero ;-)
I live for free,
Because i harvest my neighborhood's souls.
i just plugged my home network to city network without using energy usage meter (JK)
Just wait til you get busted. It WILL end up costing you MORE in the long run than we all pay... 🤦🏻
Please add one more topic to your backlog: energy harvesting modules.
The thing is almost no energy sources may be used directly without any conditioning. There are specialized modules for piezo elements, for energy harvesting from tiny solar panels and so on. With such circuits your device can harvest even tiny short-living bursts of energy, effectively conserve them in a battery and provide later when needed to measure and send the data. Very rarely you can also see circuits without an energy buffer, the most notorious example of such approach is EnOcean kinetic harvesters built into wall light switches. Patented and probably the only of this kind.
Also there is a lot of relevant research papers on the topic. Such papers often list comparison tables for different energy sources: energy density (size to energy ratio), efficiency, typical energy output and so on. I would love to see such data in the video.
Sorry. I was working on the energy harvesting and energy saving methods for my master's thesis, that's why this video triggered me so much. Thank you for your videos!
I feel ya it triggered me a bit too and I don't even utilize energy harvesting for my work.
Though to be in the spirit of the video ultra capacitors would be better than batteries as the purpose was to eliminate the battery and its life expectancy problem.
Though im sure there are plenty of batteries that would work just fine for that sort of application. IDK you would know better i'm just a robotics guy.
this is a very interesting topic.
I am considering to make it a subject for a mini project
Really loving the "high production value" your videos are having. Everything is very well done. Even the introduction is made carefully. Loving the content!
4:57 you mean FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER
FOOOOOOL BRIDGE RECTIFIER
*drammatic zoom in and zoom out intensifies*
ANYBODY SAID FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER
FUUUULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!!!
Mehedi Sadagdhar
4:57
Smiling DC. Make me unsee it
Speak English
Agreed
:D
Out of all the things in this video, you noticed that "smiling DC".
I don't know if that makes you well observant or someone with a short attention span. It made me chuckle a bit.
„Pareidolie“ 🤓
It would be really interesting to see how much power one could get from a roadway with a blanket of piezo disks across it.
If you're really interested in this a fun craft to do is to wire up some small piezo discs to an led inside the bottom of a shoe and watch it light up as you run. The amount of energy you get out of the piezo disc is really small though I think the results of a road version would be pretty disappointing :(
Steve Mould has a great video about the piezoelectric effect and why it happens based on the crystal structure/lattice of molecules that make up the thing being shocked/compressed and expanded. Think it makes sense that it wouldn't be a ton of energy when you watch that. Sure lots of energy from the impacts is lost to deformation/heating of the element and subsequent sound waves etc. so wouldn't think much of the actual energy goes into ends up in electrons flowing through the output wires.
Reminds me of "Solar Freaking Roadways" for some reason
You have a chance of increasing rolling resistance, and that would be undesired.
Besides, tires tends to eat into asphalt, so a no telling how long a piezo-surface would last.
@@erlendse yah basically same problem with solar roadways roads get replaces because they undergo a lot of wear over time, thunderfoot did a few "debunk" videos on why it's just a bad idea
Brother i was watching all of your videos. But few months ago I left watching. Now i m back and enjoying again..THANK YOU for your efforts and lot of knowledge
Why did someone dislike, there is nothing to dislike, it's all facts
They dislike because it goes over their head
The dislikes are from toxic fortnite kids.
The dislikes are coming from battery manufacturers.
They are that free energy machine creators
Thay also might have not liked the video people are wierd in this world
6:25 maybe putting the piezo disc in a case with a steel ball to hit it would help
If he mounted the steel ball on a spring solderd to the piezo that's how motion sensors in car alarms work.
@@dogwalker666 ah a spring...yeah that would work too...the ball would move to the vibration and the spring would translate that vibration into the piezo plate, I was thinking maybe a fixed arm, but the spring would probably be better even though it might lose some of the movement due to damping
@@haydenc2742 you do get damping but you also get resonance too.
Calculators: Energy Harvesting done right
You'd think that, but some solar calculators actually have fake panels in. It's cheaper to fit a tiny button-type battery than to fit a solar cell. The battery will run flat, eventually - but a calculator chip draws in the micro-amps when sleeping, so that battery will last a few years. Long enough that the calculator is probably long lost, and if not the owner will just discard it as faulty.
@@vylbird8014,
The buttons will wear out before the battery dies.
I'd love to see you cover an RF wake-up system for IoT.
Receiving RF transmissions can be rough on the power budget. If you use timing to know when to wake up and Rx, you need a RTC and wake-up interval short enough to prevent losing sync.
A wake-up system is a passive (or *extremely* low-power) circuit tuned for a signal at a particular frequency, which can serve to wake up the main microcontroller/receiver. This allows you the flexibility of broadcasting the wake-up signal whenever you want, followed by transmission of your regular data payload.
The connection is that passive wake-up circuits are essentially a special case of RF energy harvesting, which got limited coverage in this video.
rx'ing a wireless signal doesn't use much power. You only really need power to demod and interpret the signal which can realistically be done with a low-power mcu. It get's more difficult with protocols like wifi since they require a response to a request e.g. tx'ing some data and that's where you have your high energy consumption up in the 100mW's.
BLE solves this by reducing the data rate thus allowing for lower tx power and reducing the number of transmissions e.g. not requiring a response every 0.1 seconds and being ok with several seconds between transmissions.
@@web1bastler I mean, something like a nRF24L01+ draws 7-11 mA during Tx (depending on output power) and 12-13 mA during Rx. A CC2652R draws 7-10 mA during Tx, and ~7 mA during Rx. Other chips are broadly similar.
Rx can be deceptively bad though. Tx you can often wake up, scream into the void, and then go back to sleep. With Rx, you may need to *keep* powering the receiver until you either A) hear something or B) time out and give up.
That's where a RF wake-up system really helps.
My house gas water heater uses a thermal harvester on the pilot flame to blink a little red led.
my heat gun uses a similar system to indicate that it is still to hot to be put in its case
They often use this thermopile on the pilot to keep the gas valve open. If the pilot goes out, the generation stops, the valve closes, and you don't get a gas leak.
@@eDoc2020 I see you also watch technology connections ;)
@@beware_the_moose I do but that's a coincidence. I haven't seen a video where he talks about gas valves.
@@beware_the_moose Did you maybe confuse Technology Connections with Steve Mould? The latter one published a video about thermocouples just two weeks ago.
Mechanical vibrations: magnet on rod on the washing machine, coil stuck on the wall, profit
Fun fact: Piezoelectric Effect is the ability of certain materials to generate an electric charge in response to applied mechanical stress eg: piezo disk . The word Piezoelectric is derived from the Greek piezein, which means to squeeze or press, and piezo, which is Greek for “push”.
Is piezoelectric effect the reason some hard candy spark when struck with a hammer?
6:28 When we hit the piezoelectric disc both side of the disc experiences am impulse...
But in case of washing machine it does not experience any impulse as the other side of the disc is not hitting and surface to experience a normal Reaction force...
I suggest to place any another still object touch the exposed surface of the disc so that the disc can experience a normal Reaction force...
Or also we can also attach any other heavy object directly to the other side of the disc which will actually result in applying Normal reaction force die to increased Inertia.
Anyways loved your beautiful efforts for us to gain some brilliant knowledge while we are at home safe.😊
You Literary just showed my entire undergraduate dissertation In 10 minutes, I'm very impressed
I'm disappointed, I was looking forward to RF energy.
Same dude :(
@@leandroebner1405 same here
@@danielliaw6860 feel with you mate :D
this day is gonna be great because GreatScott! uploaded
You're welcome :-)
This "Whole Planet is more than what we started with"
# 0 Point Energy.
"Something From Nothing"
Greetings from czech republic, great videos keep up the good work!
I do t care what anyone says about your channel.....You are the best descriptive electronics channel on YT.
I know someone who is doing reaserch in RF harvesting at my university and the upper limits are something around -35 dBm so about .3 microWatt, this can definitely be used for some aplications like sensors.
Usually low powered systems like the ones show use a halve wave bridge rectifier consisting of a single diode that has a forwars voltage of less than .1V the system shown whas definately not optimised for this. Even if the full wave sounds cooler and get more energy usually in low power systems higher voltages are more preferable so halve wave rectifiers are used.
The IOT system requirements were way to high, you could have a protocol like BLE take 100 micro seconds to send a message so it would take less than 200 micro seconds while consuming 10 mA definately not one whole second.
About 40 years ago I was told of someone who lived about 800 yards from a long wave transmitter and using copper bars in his roof harvested the energy. The story goes that he was found out because people complained about the dead spot he created behind his house. How much of this is true I don't know, it came from someone I had no reason to disbelieve and we did have loose links to the Home Office department that would have investigated it.
@@twotone3070 First, if you consider RF harvesting as a means of getting free energy to save in the electricity bill, it's stupid because it would take millions of years, or more, to pay back the materials and equipment needed.
The ways I see to reduce RF in an area is by blocking the line of sight with a wall or a metal mesh or more feasible by generating noise and interfering the signal so the receiver can't recieve correctly the original signal. It could be also possible to reflect the signal so that you have multipath propagation and generate echos that would interfere but don't know if this would be possible.
I am a commerce student but I am also very much interested in electronics and you have taught me many things of electronics thanks for that ☺️
On the washers unit you would probably have to get to the bracket on the inside away from the spring so it's attached to the most vibrating part of the machine bracket so it will have more effect that be near the bottom of the washer where the spring connects to the agitators bass and I'll be where the machine shakes the most inside while it's on spin cycle and all the other Cycles
6:41 maybe securing the disc on the washing machine and having a small free-moving weight directly above it would work better.
Sounds good
@@greatscottlab Und bedenke auch, dass jeder Piezo seine individuelle Eigenresonanzfrequenz hat.
Diese dünnen Piezo-Scheiben sind für hohe Töne optimiert. Wenn Du langsamere Vibrationen effizient "harvesten" möchtest, dann muss der Piezo anders geformt sein.
Letztendlich funzt es am besten in Verbindung mit einem passenden Reonanzkörper und einem aufs Gesamtsystem abgestimmten Gewicht.
Deine Piezo-Scheibe würde wahrscheinlich wie verrückt "abgehen", wenn Du sie an passender Stelle auf einer Geige befestigen und den passenden Ton spielen würdest.
Die Waschmaschine vibriert dafür viel viel viel zu niederfrequent.
Beim Befestigen an einer Geige müsste noch der optimale Punkt gefunden werden, wo das Gehäuse die maximale Schwingungsamplitude aufweist.
Ganz so einfach ist das alles also nicht, mit Piezos. Aber wenn man es richtig macht, dann bringen die ordentlich viel.
@@EDVDompteurEnglish brother English
@@EDVDompteur we are not Germans but love greatscott
@@laxmiibhele8376 Sorry, please use a translator, like www.deepl.com
My comment was more a hint for GreatScott himself and my english ist not so good for complicated technical topics. It's allwas better, a commentator writes in his own mother language. Who wants, can use a translator, or even integrate it into his/her browser. The result of such a translation is surely much better, compared to my weak english. :-)
I like the idea of switching ON/OFF the TV thanks to a simple circuit. I guess it will be the subject of a video!
Great Job! Thanks.
As a rf engineer it would be quite interesting to try the rf method again but with a little help to find the right frequency for your area. If I find the time to test it myself I will send you the the video of my results. Tv broadcast signals are pretty strong and annoying for us, so using these might work.
I think it would also be important to pair the harvesting circuit with a suitable antenna!
Surely a big antenna on your roof pointing toward the transmitter and designed for those frequencies would be worth a try
Great video! I've been reading about the advances of low energy harvesting via radio frequency through iot devices through university papers published online for a while and this video is a good compliment to those papers. Thanks from America!
I want to see this man try out Minecraft Redstone
9:00 Did you see things for phones, that blinks when you receive a call? IIRC these things didn't use batteries. I had one in transparent case, no batteries
Sadly, these isn't longer produced
Yeah I remember those.
I guess they attenuate the signal? Not ideal.
8:45 - I think the 5G conspiracy theorists would disagree with you. LOL
That tiny IC that's powerd by IR light is actually pretty genius. In theory nothing needs to be in standby for a remote to work.
The free energy comes from old telephone lines too. Enough to light up 6-11 5mm led, depends how bright you need.
GreatScott is my favorite asian gothic electronic youtuber :)
You could try a single diode rectifier in order to reduce the other 3 diode voltage drops. Also, you could use the Joule thief I think you already covered in your videos to boost the voltage obtained from low signal harvesters.
A simple experiment for the piezo: add a bit weight to the "free" side of your piezo. Inertia will add more push/pull forces and you'll get higher voltage out.
Perpetual Motion/Energy = The Universe
but we are still far from knowing how to utilize it.
I love your work.
Ive been wanting to making all of these before but never thought it would be practical,
i watch all your videos ! from Morocco i love your content
Picking RF with a long wire an a tank circuit tuned in a strong broadcast, rectifier bridge and an electrolytic, you can lit the LED
@great scott Instead of bridge rectifier you can use single diode for rectification to lower the voltage drop.
I was hoping for an RF harvesting example, I saw that you can get battery-less bluetooth tags and was amazed that you can actually get some data back. I think there was even plans to develop sensors with power coming from RF power harvesting.
About harvesting from mechanical vibrations
You should anchor one of the sides of the piezo to a fixed surface , by doing so you drastically increase the amount of energy transfered to the cristal
Or just attaching a weight to the other plate of the piezo device to increase its inertia.
Ah another thing , you should consider something like idroelectric generators connected to your water implant , so that the pressure of the water charges your battery
@@NielMalan correct ,basically he is moving the whole volume of the piezo , basically he is using is own mass to generate electeicity
Stick a magnet to the washing machine ! And place a coil next to it, I wonder how much this would make
Stick 10 kilogrammes of powerful neodymium magnets on the drum (no clothes in the drum!) . Build coils around it. Run the motor of the machine (typically 300 watts).
I bet you'll get more than 300 watts out using up to 10 kilogrammes worth of strong magnets.
Free energy is a piece of piss
The best part at very end showing world application, doing away with standby circuit, brilliant!
A better way for the piezo: mount to vibration source near edge, add small weight on point far away, so flexing occurs during vibration. Best to have a mechanical resonance effect to drive piezo with big amplitude.
Some examples of energy harvesting powered devices:
Shake powered flashlights.
Windup radios & flashlights.
Shoes that light when you walk.
Self winding watches.
Yo-yo w/lights.
Many toys w no batteries but still light when rolled, dropped, shook, etc.
Full bridge rectifier!!! Electroboom would be proud of you!
For vibration, maybe attach the piezo to a stationary fixture and attach some rubber cushion to the washing machine and let it hit the piezo when it vibrated.
There's a lot of research going on in RF harvesting and I saw some very good demonstrations, and there's also biological energy harvesting for bioelectronics and implantable devices.
You have very good understanding in energy harvesting techniques
I was literally thinking about this topic 2 hours ago
He made this video for u in under 2 hours!
This happens to me with EACH VIDEO, with 1-2 day interval ..
@@Fidozo15 Lol.
About mechanical energy harvesting: i once saw an interesting but probably too expensive concept.
some sort of windmill generators in the middle of the highway, that would spin around because of traffic going both ways. Best for roads with a lot of cargo trucks
you can actually harvest a very tiny bit of energy using radio waves. you can build a am radio which works just only on the power provided by the signal and produce sound. look it up it sure is a thing. please make a house tour pleaseeeeeeeee
Theses are some really interesting ideas for increasing efficiency even by a little
For RF frequency energy harvesting, the easiest is an crystal AM radio. When I was young, tuning into one of my local radio stations at AM600, there was enough DC energy to power a mechanical meter and even a real headphones. The normal super efficient crystal radio earpiece wasn't necessary for that particular radio station. At my last house, the mains 60Hz was easy to harvest, though, I had 250kv lines a block away from my house running in parallel. 1 good solid beam of metal plus a connection to an earthing GND was enough to illuminate LEDs.
3:52 I screamed out loud "FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER"
Add a small weight to the other side of your piezoelectric disk and tune your antenna and RF circuit to 2.4 GHz.
The disk will not experience much force no matter how hard you vibrate it without some inertia to act against. 2.4 GHz is not only the most likely noise to be found, but cheap commercial circuits and antennas that use it are very easy to find and it propagates quite far.
This would be awesome --
Energy Harvesting --
Small Wind Turbines for:
Portable Personal..
Wearable
Handheld
Lager portable unit to carry to any desired location.
Devices that mount to bicycles, motorcycles, cars, etc.
In windy places & while physically moving through the air, one could get a little fan or turbine moving pretty fast.
Enough to charge a cell phone for example.. Or more.
One often missed easy to find windy location is right next to or on top of tall buildings. Such buildings literaly create their own wind.
Project idea: Figure out how to harvest the energy from all of the tracing over letters that occurs when you write something down :-)
This is an extremely useful video. Everything was very well explained!
It would have been good to see radio frequency harvesting
I covered it
@@greatscottlabYes, I meant in action :)
You need big antenas and grounding to harvest micro watts. And if you have something that can be powered with that tiny amount of energy, it would last decades with a single button cell. It’s not practical
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio try it out :) but the energy harvested is not practical as mentioned before.
@@yaroslavpanych2067 Yes! They both are electromagnetic waves but in different wavelength.
For those considering the piezo method, in addition to the comments below about method of attachment, keep in mind that the charge and discharge rate of a capacitor is directly proportional to both the value of the capacitor and the resistance (effectively r x c in seconds). You could utilize this by having a fairly large resistor connecting the capacitor with the circuit you want to power and some sort of switching circuit that switches the capacitor between your charging and discharging circuits
Note: RC actually gives you Tau, which can be used to calculate charge and discharge rates, but the point still stands, the larger the resistance and/or capacitance, the longer it takes to charge and discharge
For the vibration one, a good idea would maybe be something like a small weight haning above it, and as soon as the whole thing vibrates, the weight will hit the piezo crystal.
I've heard of the RF energy one, I'm an amateur radio operator and have an antenna that is resonant on the HF bands. Over the course of a few days you can get enough energy to power an LED briefly, but yeah definitely not the best source of power. However, you are close to a station that is putting out several kilowatts of RF, then it could be possible. Hope this helps, love the videos and keep up the great work!!
@Lassi Kinnunen Yeah that's true, but that's mostly just direct electric transfer like a transformer. Still could be a neat concept if it wasn't so dangerous and illegal lol.
In this topic you should do some research on the enocean protocol (battryless domotic)
Nice video! For greater efficiency try to increase the oscillations of the piezoelectric. Attaching it somewhere is not enough, there must be good relative motion between the sides and the center for a greater deformation and thus energy output.
You can easily calculate a spring damper system that maximizes its output amplitude when stimulated with the input frequency of the washing machine. If you attach that to the piezo, your power output should be a lot higher.
For the piezo disk, you should try to generate bending in the plate by clamping the outer edge and adding a mass to the center part of the disk.
One thing I saw once on UA-cam: the guy put LOTS of peltier modules around a barbecue grill (on the outside, of course) and used the energy to move a motor which rotated the meat.
Anyway, I think it's a neat idea. You can make food while working with electronics... It's the best of the 2 worlds. 😬
Stay safe there! 🖖😊
What you can also do is harvesting magnetic fields around cables that carry a high current. I have a screw driver with a built in led that lights up when it gets around 10cm next to cables when they carry energy. Would also be suitable for factories or homes
thanks, I enjoyed this little video. so full of good information
For the piezo, hang a hammer (or something else with some mass) on the side of the washing machine, with the face of the hammer contacting the piezo. Then you have some actual pressure on the disc when the washing machine vibrates.
Been doing passive power harvesting for 10+ years lol nothing new. good to see people taking it seriously tho.
So, this is particularly interesting to me. I did an entire year long project with a major international contractor to focus on energy harvesting on rotor aircraft with Piezoelectrics. We figured out that it is "technically" possible, but the problem came down to cost and the rather low output power just due to the terrible efficiency of direct mechanical to electrical systems. Very cool video regardless!
Could you please share your findings. Am doiong my bachelor thesis on the topic.
i always think of a "sound" harvester, maybe in factories/places where there is a continous noise. I thought of a vibrating sheet with resonant frequency of the most intense audio noise frequency that hits a piezo. Never actually done it but in theory this should do a good job
I would have been curious about the amount of energy you can get from sound. Especially to be able to send the link to people asking me the question quite often.
@@FavoritesAG well, actually i've only found some videos (well made) on the subject and some papers on google scholar. If you search "sound energy harvest" and "Determination of the appropriate piezoelectric materials for various types of piezoelectric energy harvesters" you will find some interesting researches on the matter
"Radio frequency: Nope" All RFID and NFC devices shuddered in disgust.
Nice, a new video.
What laptop do you use?
A pretty generic one
@@greatscottlab can you give me a name pls
@@Darius-wu8me msi
A great application for energy harvesting would be to use it inside these super cheap 2$ solar garden LED lamps. They have a single small NiCd battery inside them, and a tiny solar cell.
I would live to cheaply hack one and put an ESP8266 inside it that gets powered as soon as an IC somehow detects that the battery is charged enough to sustain reading a sensor, connect to WiFi and transmit an MQTT message. But sadly, I haven't found a super cheap way to do that yet. Any help appreciated!
I think it would be awesome to be able to use these 2$ solar-powered waterproof enclosures as IoT sensor nodes - either using Wifi or LoRa.
re: RF harvesting. Need WIDE-BAND reception. Need to use Germanium diodes (1N34) like Tate Ambient Power Module. Need a really good ground connected to the negative side. Iron plates are buried in the ground. The antenna is a LARGE isolated capacitive structure to receive incoming cosmic rays, particles from the Sun, etc. A high antenna is better but more dangerous. Need spark arresters. The antenna can feed a large inductance coil and small value capacitance have less dampening in the oscillation. Tune for 100khz to 300khz -- lightning strike frequencies around the planet.
Thank you for all this kind of knowledge!
I have learned a lot from your videos!
If you want a standalone attachable vibration harvesting device you need a mass to provide resistance to the vibration
For the radio frequency harvester, you can use the same circuit of cristal radio.
A great topic! Well done! We need a new development project on that
All you need is a long extension cord and you plug it into neighbor's outlet.
Unscrew light bulb and put receptacle plug in an outdoor light fixture for your extension cord works at night
For things like motors (including your washing machine) that rotate at a set frequency you could use a weight attached to two springs, setting it's natural resonance frequency to that of the washing machine. This would create a positive feedback moving the weight back and forward. If that weight was now a permanent magnet, and you surrounded the 'harvester' with a coil, you could generate an AC current. A bit more faff that a piezo disk, but would probably produce much more power. I guess such a harvesting device would be the exact opposite of mass-tuned damper.
Take the humble inductor as a generator coil in the standard rotor of magnets and stator of coils assembly. Lenz's Law is the bottleneck. What is the formula for the rise-time of an inductor (our generator coil) : T = L / R
If we increase the inductance (L), we increase the rise time and so retard the opposing magnetic field, Lenz's Law works but its effects are delayed.
Doing this negates the 'push' on an incoming magnet and negates the 'pull' as it passes the inductor centre.
This effect is stackable but only works within a small phase window, explore it :)
A magnet and a coil coupled to the washing machine shock absorber promisses far more usable quantity of elecricity than even a specialized thick wide piezoelectric transduser.
Many years ago I read article about USA students making IOT system for seismic sensors powered by induction forces from power cables.
I think RF is a good idea for wireless power transfer. Design a transmitter to transmit power to wireless sensors and you never have to change batteries. RF can transmit through walls, etc. and you could design different sensors to operate with different frequencies so you could choose what to power by only transmitting at those frequencies.
For the piezo, you should fix a mass on the white part of the disk or place the disk between the machine and the ground (if it can support the weight)
the RF one could work at tiny power levels, but you would need to match the circuit to the antenna, and a local Radio station. not a lot of power, but that's how crystal radios work, so it does work at tiny levels.
*GreatScott : i hope you enjoy this video
*me saying a the same time : I WILL SEEEEEEEE YOUU NEXT TIME
I observe that almost all energy harvesting comes from something that is plugged in, so you can just as well also plug this device in. Also, batteries and capacitors have a limited lifetime.
Piezo crystals can output over 5000 volts if they are hit properly. The clicking cigarette lighters use tiny piezo crystals.