Long distance hiking trips are thought provoking. Almost everyone get’s more insights about certain aspects of his life and Aaron LeMieux was no difference. During his AT hike a few years ago he thought about ways to use and preserve the kinetic energy he produced during the day walking. An average human walking up a set of stairs will expend around 200 Watts of power. When you recharge your cell phone the most amount of power it will accept is 2.5 Watts. If you could harvest your walking power and deliver it to your phone to recharge the battery this would be perfect. No batteries or chargers to carry, no weather dependencies using solar panels etc.
A few years fast forward it seems that the final product called nPower PEG will be available to end customers this spring as Aaron told me. Looking like a tube the a length of a underarm as shown in the picture above (which shows Aaron and his wife btw.) this is my next “must have” gadget for the trail. It will not generate enough power to re-charge a laptop but mobile phones, MP3-Players, GPS receivers etc. should work fine. The only thing missing is the ability to recharge your camera battery (when will the camera producers finally start incorporating Mini-USB ports for recharging?).
#1 by pro2type on May 13, 2010 - 22:23
Its possible to by nPower PEG from their homepage. Looking forward to some testreports.
#2 by RedYeti on March 15, 2010 - 01:20
Looking forward to hearing how you get on with using this Roman!
Thanks for the info. I’ve found all you “on the trail charging” related posts a great help – cheers!
#3 by Scott on March 4, 2010 - 21:10
The listed price for this would pay for a lot of other energy systems, and you can’t escape the basic physics of this (sort of like a bike generator – no batteries but it will slow you down some). I can’t imagine it being very efficient, which means you’re wasting a lot of energy on top of hiking which would get annoying very quickly.
Personally, I simply wired some surplus lawn light solar cells together and put a 7805 5V voltage regulator and USB socket on the output. Works fine, nearly unbreakable and charges a 4-Cell AAA NiMH pack (which can then be run out through the regulator and socket) when nothing else is plugged in. Weighs a few ounces and is pretty sturdy.
After the build I decided that I go off the grid to go off the grid, so I turn my cell phone off, bring an extra set of batteries for the GPS and leave it at home in a sunny window.
#4 by Mike on March 4, 2010 - 09:03
Hello.
I’m trying to intuitively grasp how this works and struggling to remember my school physics, but it wouldn’t be quite a free lunch, would it? I can’t find many details on that website about what it’s doing to harness the energy, apart from the technology page that only describes it loosely.
Presumably this device must cause some extra resistance (even if it’s tiny) to generate the power. If you spend 200 watts of power getting up the stairs, it’s probably because that’s how much power is needed. If 2.5 watts is sucked away for other purposes, you won’t reach the top. What’s more likely is that you’ll realise you’re not at the top and put in the extra work to generate another 2.5 watts to get there. Unless it’s harnessing energy that would otherwise be wasted, like preventing you from thumping your foot unnecessarily hard onto the ground. I don’t know… am I missing something counter-intuitive here?
Not to say that it wouldn’t be a very handy and often useful thing to have even if it did make walking marginally harder, especially if the extra work required is not very significant compared with the walking.
#5 by pro2type on March 2, 2010 - 13:48
Very promising. It is however the third year in row its promised to be available this spring. If it ever materialize, its going to be a great thing for thru-hikers.
#6 by lighthiker on March 2, 2010 - 14:25
Yep and I hope so, too. Recently he won two awards, hired additional people etc. so I hope that spring means spring this year…
#7 by Joe on March 2, 2010 - 10:43
Very interesting concept for those of us planning long distance hikes. As you say it avoids a lot of the problems of other systems (batteries and weather dependencies). I’d be happy to carry it in my backpack but I’m not sure there will much take-up of their proposed leg band.
I hear you on the issue of camera recharging. I can only assume there is a lot of money to be made selling spare batteries?!
#8 by lighthiker on March 2, 2010 - 14:28
I bet! It is a bit like the ink cartridges for printers. The printer costs virtually nothing and they rip you off with the ink. Don’t know why it is so hard to use the (most of the time already existing) Mini-USB port for the recharging…