Flashlight that works from the movement of air

Imagine that the apartment turned off the light. You are in the dark groping a flashlight in a tool box ... and his batteries are dead! The situation is worse and hard to imagine.

Probably this often happened with South Korean engineer Tim Cho. He made a simple flashlight, which you need to blow, like a whistle. I blew - and the LED worked.



Tim Cho with his flashlight, whistle, won first place in the engineering competition " wind word » ( "Catch the Wind") , which is arranged MakerBot company, manufacturer of 3D-printers.

The design of the flashlight is quite simple. For its manufacture, even a cheap 3D printer is suitable.



The author designed the design in Autodesk Inventor. The lantern consists of 15 individual parts. Printing each of them took approximately 30 minutes with a layer height of 0.2 mm and a filling density of 25%. Having spent seven and a half hours printing, he assembled them together and added electronic components: coils, magnets, diode bridge, LED, wires, etc.

If you blow hard into the hole, then the built-in mini-turbine begins to rotate along with the generator magnets. Then the generator coils generate alternating current (AC). A diode bridge converts alternating current to direct current (DC). Depending on the volume of the lungs and muscles of the person, the voltage in the DC circuit is from 0.5 to 1 volt. To light up the LED, you need at least 3 volts. Therefore, the engineer had to use a booster "voltage boost" (Joule thief).



Files for printing a flashlight are published in the Thingiverse catalog .