Supercapacitor contest winners

Windell writes – “A few weeks ago I started a tiny contest, where the challenge was to come up with the best project idea involving supercapacitors. A number of regular Make forum participants submitted entries, and I suspect that a lot of the other (quiet) participants here would be interested to see some of the supercapacitor project ideas that came out of the contest. After what seemed like an endless evening of reading and debating the entries, we finally got through the stack. The results of the contest and the long list of honorable-mention supercapacitor project ideas are now posted…I hope that the list comes in handy.

The Grand Prize (ten supercapacitors) goes to Stephen Kupiec, for his winning entry, “Supercap Project Luxeon V Throwie“: A Luxeon V LED driven off of a LuxDrives 3021 buckpuck has been sporadically putting out a very short bright flash every 15-30 min on my desk startling coworkers. But it hasn’t been connected to power in over a month. The buckpuck has been harvesting power from 220 microfarad electrolytic capacitor which is in the circuit as a power line conditioner. Given a 1 farad supercap coupled with a very low (10000:1) duty cycle flasher circuit, a very distracting flasher could be made. We selected this entry both for its originality, as well as for taking advantage of the low internal resistance of the supercaps.

If anyone tries out any of these projects, I (and a lot of other people) would love to hear about it!” [via] – Link.