Here’s the best resource I can find on the tech he’s using. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eom2.12116

Hopefully I picked the right video here, he has hundreds. In one of the videos robert measures mA with some of these in series and powering some LEDs, I believe, or I’ve confused that with another video.

From the paper, I just skimmed but it seems that most of the energy is kinetic, then possibly converted into static? I’ll obviously need to do some actual reading.

I’ve seen that one before. Robert Murray-Smith shows a different approach which I’ve also experimented with. https://youtu.be/WYUwBGQS5_E?si=P_H8JJpeeSMnJKg-

Inspiration for building something hit me when the following things happened:

• I learned that small amounts of electricity can be harvested from a single drop of rainwater, both from the kinetic energy and shorting two electrodes. I don’t know the how, but I’ve seen something like 200mV from a small trickle of water from a faucet.
• I moved to a place that where it rains a lot and bought a house with which I could do some experiments. This house is also on a slope.
• I got a 3d printer.

I figured that I could create a small, maybe 1cm x 1cm device that could harvest 200mV when a drop of water hits it. 200mV isn’t much, but if I had 100 of them hooked together in a 10cm x 10cm square, that could be somewhere between 1-100x that voltage (though, more likely lower than that unless it’s a downpour).

Then I got thinking, well it’s water, so after the kinetic energy and whatnot has been harvested it could go into a large bucket at the top of the slope. That large bucket could then be connected to a tube that’s connected to this mini 12v dc hydro generator I bought off amazon. Of course then I could use the energy generated/harvested during the day to pump water back up to the bucket at night… (ok, would have to be a large bucket and I realize this is still small amounts of electricity)…

I guess the reason we don’t see commercial systems like this has to do with energy density. After printing and prototyping and hours of trial and error, I may arrive at a device that can harvest/generate 0-15v depending on the weather. I imagine if I were to buy some TI energy harvesting devices and put them all together, I would be able to get enough energy to charge my phone in a day, but it may set me back the price of a house and may take up the size of a room to do so.

I guess my realisitic-use case would be to take something like what I just described and use it to power some outside LEDs. Then, everytime it rains, the LEDs would twinkle, and that would kind of be neat to see. Especially if these devices were installed in something like a raingutter system with individual LEDs, sort of lighting up roughly wherever rain drops were hit. No energy stored, just used as it’s harvested. It sounds like if it did work, it would be a big undertaking and would require quite a lot of time and money to build.

But still. twinkles!

Hold the phone! You’re telling me now that the government lies to people?!

I have also heard of this tale of “not-spots” but have found no evidence myself. The SWR and near field antennas stuff you mentioned makes a lot of sense, I just didn’t understand how I could be stealing electrons meant for others. I mean, if it worked that way wouldn’t trees also creat not spots, especially if they get to a certain height?! Anyway, thanks for the info, and… 73?

It may surprise you to know that in the US as a ham, I have the legal right to hoist an antenna or build a tower so long as it doesn’t fall on a power line.

But even then, I don’t think this setup will create nulls. Say the antenna is 400 meters away which I think is still in the far field but I could be wrong. Even if I erected an almost resonant tower (160m) and assuming the regulatory bodies gave me the permit to do so, assuming it’s not powered and simply is resonant, maybe the radiation pattern changes but not so dramatically that my neighbors on the opposite side of my antenna (from the tower) will get poor reception.

Is the direction of the radiation pattern changing what was meant by the “not-spots”?

That is the most plausible explanation I have heard but I still have questions. Say there’s an MW tower down the road and I have a 160m tower in my backyard. If I understand correctly, my tower may cause the signal coming from the AM tower to be re-resonated back to the AM tower so the AM tower needs to be detuned. But say I want to harvest the signal and I have tuned my tower to be resonant with the AM tower. Maybe in this case the SWR reading at the AM station is different because it is getting some of that re-radiated power back, and maybe the radiation pattern of the am station has changed slightly, but wouldn’t the main AM tower cover any gaps just like how waves spread out in the double slit experiment once they hit my resonant tower?

I get that a tower excites another tower, and I can understand that the AM engineers will likely hate me, but I don’t understand how radio reception could be affected. If anything, I might have made the station more directional (like a reflector in a yagi) but probably not.

I’m skeptical of the “not-spot” claims here. This would suggest that radios also create “not-spots” when being tuned to as well, or that somehow the florescent light tubes were able to “pull” more electrons from the air that were destined to other radios.

Absolutely. It’s just a well-read word-suggester. Thanks for the links!

Oh yeah, i’ve seen that before! I’ll need to try to make one of these as well. Looks like a fun experiment!

I guess the difference for me would be how long it stores that energy for, but the difference is probably semantic and easily changed with a few capacitors.

Oh yeah, I hear you on LLMs. Technically, ChatGPT has not “heard” of anything. It’s generally something I use as a jumping-off point when I’m desperate and don’t know what search query to use.

Does passive RFID harvest its power? I don’t know much about RFID (I’ll probably head over to wikipedia after this comment) but I figured that it was a circuit that, when given a bit of energy from a reader, sends back an RF signal with an encoded ID and that in the absence of that powered reader, the RFID device wouldn’t be transmitting anything.

Fantastic, thanks! I’ll take a look

Hail satan!

You seem to be missing the point of decentralization.

This kid is a dumb pile of shit. I recommend everyone block him.

Reddit is coated in a thick white layer of spez.

Get in the zone, autozone!

Bitwarden, self hosted.

Why not set up a full instance and make it invite only?

TempleOS