This is part 6 of an ~8-part series I’m doing on bike-powered devices. If you’ve got a link to another device that should be included or a better-documented version of any of these, comment below or email me and I’ll add it to my last post in the series, summarizing all the interesting pedal-powered projects we’ve found by category. I learned about most of these devices through the old-news Innovate or Die contest.
These designs product power. Suspension scavenger is neat to me because it’s not creating resistance to your forward motion: you’re just using energy that’s wasted bouncing up and down:
Also shift into:
- A big wooden wheel, which supposedly helps smooth power output
- Pedal Power API makes sense: use mechanical energy when feasible, and generate electricity when not
What’s the most efficient bike electricity generator design you can find?
2 thoughts on “Pedal Powered World, #6: Power Generation”
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Where does the energy dissipated in the suspension fork come from? Oh right, it comes from pedaling. Which is why people who really care about losing propulsion efficiency on a bike don’t have bikes with suspensions in the first place. But if you’re stuck with a springy fork, this is a cool way of dumping the extra motion into batteries instead of heating up the fork.