Charge Your Cellphone Using Wasted Heat (and Build a Steampunk Wall-E)

Step 10 Reader Suggestions: Joule Thief

Kryptonite asked us to see if we could implement a Joule thief with the thermoelectric generator.

A Joule thief is a transformer feedback single transistor inverter. We found some details via hackaday on this site. Apparently it is a circuit a lot of people are using to drain the last remaining volts out of a battery. The one we built worked down to about 0.30V.

Here we have it using the waste heat from our toaster oven to turn on a LED

We even tried to use the circuit with our body heat and ice for the cooling side. It worked but it sure made us feel cold 'cause it drew our body heat away. Yikes!

Comments

[scraptopower]

Nice, I built on too, you can see it here. It's difficult to keep the cool side cool though!  sites.google.com/site/reukpower/teg-gnerator-2

[Kryptonite]

Wow I didn't think it would be that much of a success with my idea of a joule thief, but I'm happy to be a help! ~K