Wind up LED light, possible??

[ateallthepies]

We have wind up radios and I think there is some kind of a wind up torch somewhere out there but has anyone thought of combining a decent emitter with a wind up supply engine?

It would be the sort of light that could be stored indefinitely and ready to use and supply a decent light output with just a wind of a spring?

Imagine, no batteries to worry about!!


Steve.

 

[mcnair55]

Plenty of wind up LED lights out there in the UK for sure most are rubbish though and well over priced.I was given one last year,my friend bought a shed load at a £1 each just to give away as a bit of a freebie to customers last chrimbo,said same item was on sale in many retail outlets for £7.99 each.

It works ok and quality is not bad but the output is very poor.

 

[Marduke]

Plenty of wind up LED lights out there in the UK for sure most are rubbish though and well over priced.I was given one last year,my friend bought a shed load at a £1 each just to give away as a bit of a freebie to customers last chrimbo,said same item was on sale in many retail outlets for £7.99 each.

It works ok and quality is not bad but the output is very poor.

Keep in mind he is talking about wind up lights, not crank lights. They are completely different.

However, the output would have to be pretty low to stay within the power capable of being generated. With modern tech, probably 5-20 lumens depending on size.

 

[ateallthepies]

Is that all, 5-20 lumens for a smallish hand held size light?

I thought more could be obtained but I guess these wind up dynamo's don't put out much power?


Steve.

 

[Marduke]

Granted, my experience and knowledge with crank dynamos is a decade out of date, but i know you could not power triple digit lumen lights in a reasonably small package. But I guess there might be new tech out there, and there is always room for improvements.

 

[Lurker]

I wonder if you could achieve something like that with a crank light and super capacitors instead of rechargeable batteries. Possibly good for long term storage because there is no battery to maintain? My emergency kit could use something like that.

But lithium batteries store so long that I am not too worried about it. Even alkalines store pretty well.

 

[Lynx_Arc]

would take a lot of cranking to run an R bin cree at spec for any length of time. Most wind up radios out there a similar battery powered model runs for weeks off batteries while a decent high power LED model light would run for perhaps 2-12 hours so if you took into account a wind up radio running for perhaps 6 hrs on windup vs weeks on batteries that is 0.25days vs 25 days or about 100 times as long on batteries vs windup which would equate to 1/100 runtime on windup vs batteries or instead of 12 hours it would the 12/100th hours or maybe 7 minutes of dimming runtime for a lot of cranking..... not worth the effort IMO. (don't take my figures as exact, just an example)