Hi Thomas !

Thanks for sharing! I know one of the Danish authors of the KInefox paper. It is very cool stuff and we hope to one day use something like this on muskoxen in Greenland.

Some of the limitations are obviously the relatively limited number of daily fixes. Also, we would probably need satellite based communication, but since the authors from Max Planck are also heavilly involved in the https://www.icarus.mpg.de/en project, I hope this kinetic energy harvesting gets incorporated in the satellite based ICARUS trackers one day.

The article you linked to refered to this paper with a dizzying list of recent energy harvesting studies:

It also seems well worth a look.

This is very cool @ThomasGray_Argos !! I tried years ago to build a benchtop version of something similar, using a 'kinetic' torch assembly, but never got much further than some very crude designs. I even approached Seiko about their watch mechanisms, but in the they weren't interested...

It's really great to see this technology get applied and I hadn't heard of the Kinetron microgenerator the researchers used. They did a fantastic job designing their system and bonus points for releasing it all to open-source! The only thing I couldn't see were costs or a bill of materials (and I could've easily missed it), as I was keen to see how much the Kinetron microgenerator was. The hybrid capacitor they used was great value at AU$7.19. 

My next project is to try harvesting radio waves using something like this: 

Urban environments might have enough ambient sources of radio waves that no additional transmission stations are needed, but for remote locations, purpose-built transmitters could work for critters that have defined, and relatively small home ranges. 

Anyway Thomas, thanks heaps for sharing and very interesting and encouraging. 

Rob

This is super cool! 

I was wondering if the development will further touch marine or aquatic animals, make it like water wheel (even might give burden to aerodynamic). Thank you for sharing!

Best,

Dhanu