Ideas 4 All

I can’t remember how I stumbled on this site but Ideas4all.com is a rather good site designed at encouraging inventive and creative thoughts and ideas across the globe. It appears the site is of Spanish origin but about 50% of contributions are in English and you can use a Google translator for the remainder.

Keen to give it a go, I registered (for free) with them before submitting one of my ideas. I used the joule thief idea (see previous post) and it wasn’t long before people were reading my idea to recycle discarded batteries. People also get to vote as to whether ideas are good or bad and at the moment I have two thumbs up.

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Recycled Power

The mind was wondering this afternoon and thoughts soon turned to creatively recycling. I remembered reading a project regarding the making of a Joule Thief which involves using a simple bit of circuitry to squeeze the last remaining juices of power out of dead batteries.

As we’re all encouraged to dispose of our spent batteries separately to the usual domestic waste, surely local councils could rack them all up at a central depot and Joule Thief them to death. The quantities of batteries thrown away on a regular basis must be staggering and this will ensure we get the most out of them.

As high intensity LEDs are replacing standard bulbs in more and more places, could we not do the same to say street lighting and power them off these banks of spent batteries. I’m also sure that if power fails, the lighting could resort to conventional means as a back up.

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Solar Thermin

In an attempt to learn the basics of electronics I hopped on the web and purchased a basic electronic kits where one of the projects was to make a Solar Thermin. This is a little musical toy which produces a variable note when sunlight shines on the solar panel. The talented ones amongst us are then able to produce some clever tunes whilst sunning themselves.

I found it really fiddly but was quite impressed with myself that I pulled off the soldering without any issues. and an hour later I had finished it.

But by the time I had finished it, sadly it wasn’t so sunny anymore and it proved difficult to get anything decent out of it, so I’ll have to wait to play sweet music in the sunshine another day.

Anyway, while we wait heres a video of one someone made earlier and they built into an Altoids tin.

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