Reminder: this subreddit is meant to be a place free of excessive cynicism, negativity and bitterness. Toxic attitudes are not welcome here.

All Negative comments will be removed and will possibly result in a ban.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

No more replacing batteries in the wireless doorbell if it's windy outisde? Neat.

Hear me out, what if we created a fan that could produce winds of 2 m/s but only used 2 volts to power it? Infinite entergy? I think so.

Edit: yes this is sarcasm.

What's the use case here?

One could power your doorbell or a traffic sensor so imagine several of these and as they get more efficient they can power more

Could both of those things not easily be connected to the grid? Seems like this would just add complexity where it isn't needed.

well you might have to blow on it though.

It seems to be really small energy. To me it is specifically for case where it is remote and changing battery is painful. A bit like a small solar panel.

Good for you.

For those who wonder, it is probably sarcasm.

Or you could just use a cheap off-the-shelf, no-moving parts battery that'll supply 290μW for... well... years. Potentially decades.

A CR2032 delivers ~225mAh at 3V. That's 675 mWh. Or 290μW for... 2327h or 3 months (if you're running it full blast at the stated 290μW all that time). From a single cheap battery.

Put a couple of AAs in there and you can run it for decades.

And it's a damn sight smaller than 15 x 20cm.

not even remotely close to possible unfortunately. 15x25 cm is not small. and yet this thing only puts out 290 millionths of a watt. a single normal AA battery can put out 2-3 watts peak power. 290 vs 2,000,000. it would take 2 years to charge a AA battery with this thing if that puts into perspective how minuscule the output is

not true, 290 microwatts is useless. 15x20cm isn't even small. a 15x20cm solar panel would be able to do around 6 watts. (assuming 20% efficiency cells). an equivalent area solar panel would be 20,000x more powerful. which is why this is article is pointless

and a 15x20 cm solar panel can do 6 watts with 20% efficiency cells. 20x more powerful than this original articles "device" lol. these breakthrough stories are getting worse by the year

Just enough to power the sensor measuring how much electricity it's generating, but not enough to tell you what it measured.

I have a smart doorbell and got tired of bringing it in and charging it for hours, then putting it back. I put a solar panel on it this week.

Can you blow air into it to produce energy?

[deleted]

Not 290milliwatts but 290 microwatts

A doorbell would need 20-30 of them which would be the size of a room lol

As someone that teaches EE, 290 uW is more than enough to run a door bell. I have have microprocessor designs that have been running 21+ years on a single CR2477 battery with a 1 amp hour capacity. That is only taking 16 uW. You use a capacitor to store energy and use just a bit when someone pushes the door bell.

These units are based on an MSP430 processor with a 915Mhz transmitter. They do sleep 99.9x% of the time. Wake up every second for 50uS and once every 10 minutes for 0.25S when they need to transmit.

I don’t need a sensor to tell me I’m watching a commercial. Any other uses?

Sorry, to clarify I ment the speaker, not the sensor / button lol