OLPC Experiments With Cow-Powered Laptops

An anonymous reader writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows. "We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal, in an October 21 e-mail posted to one of the group's discussion lists. Sarwal and others are now finalizing the design of the cow-powered generator."

Something doesn't smell right

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

There is no way this is true.
There is no way they can get cows to power laptops, there is no way they would stay in their wheel.

Now, if they suggested a beowolf cluster of hamsters then I would believe it.
As it stands this article is just a load of bull.

Wow...Second world nations?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Aren't these laptops for developing nations such as India? If so, there are *FAR* better ways to generate energy. I know that cows are work animals, but this is a terrible application. Throw up a few photovoltaics, batteries, and regulators, and you have an generator unit costing the same that does not waste your work/food animal.

Poor people using such animals tend to have a lot more common sense than we do. This is absolutely preposterous.

Re:

[pipatron (966506)]

RTFA:

the group considered using solar energy but sunlight near Mumbai was not "consistently strong."

Re:Something doesn't smell right

[FredDC (1048502)]

No, it's pretty real, they've made a deal with the OCPC project (One Cow per Child). They give the cow needed to power their laptop! It's a pretty sweet deal, you get a laptop and a cow! Now that's marketing!

Re:

[slart42 (694765)]

No, it's pretty real, they've made a deal with the OCPC project (One Cow per Child). They give the cow needed to power their laptop! It's a pretty sweet deal, you get a laptop and a cow! Now that's marketing!

On a more serious note, OCPC is actually called Send A Cow (http://www.sendacow.org.uk/ [sendacow.org.uk], they try to aid farmers to support themselves by donating livestock.

Re:Something doesn't smell right

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Cows put out 500 liters of methane a day (that's per cow.) The obvious solution is to stick a tube up their asses and run a generator off of it. No need to make them walk. :-)

Re:Something doesn't smell right

[Thaelon (250687)]

The voluminous methane cows produce is from burping. Your tube would just get clogged at the end of the cow you chose.

Re:Something doesn't smell right

[Bozdune (68800)]

Fine, then we'll put a mask on its face and collect its burps. No, wait, then it can't graze... never mind... FAIL

Cow Power

[ZeroExistenZ (721849)]

"This is a 5CP laptop, but if you could overclock it to 6CP."

Cows don't walk much

[jrumney (197329)]

Whenever I see a herd of cows, they are either standing still eating, or walking to the milking shed to be milked. Getting one to walk on a conveyer belt with no useful purpose for the cow is not going to be easy. They might get a more consistent supply hooking up a dynamo to the cow's jaw, chewing is something they do a lot of.

Re:

[Eivind (15695)]

Read the article -- cattle is already used in this region for stuff like running waterpumps and similar. So we can assume that the problem of enticing the cows to walk in a circle (not on a conveyor belt) is a solved one.

Re:Cows don't walk much

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

They should make this device "girlfriend"-sized.

You're dangerously close to talking over the readers' heads here. At least give a link to the Wikipedia entry on "girlfriend".

Any of us who've got this "girlfriend" you speak of should already have her working on our dynamo.

At least that's what I call it.

Re:Cows don't walk much

[marcello_dl (667940)]

> At least give a link to the Wikipedia entry on "girlfriend".

A girlfriend is a girl that wants to be just friend. Every girl a slashdotter encounters is like that, no need to hit wikipedia for that.

Cow Cafe

[mrbluze (1034940)]

I can see it now ... our proverbial third-world-teenager spending a sunny morning writing a slashdot journal in the shade of his cow. As he types, he notices his coffee is too strong .. no matter, a couple of squeezes of the cow and the espresso is an instant latte.

Later that evening he is having a romantic chat with his girlfriend in the next village. Things get intense and the low power warning comes on her laptop. They are cut off as a great big cowpat soils his keyboard.

(I could have gone further, but hey, this is a family show, right?)

disappointed

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

And here I was thinking the article was going to be about powering laptops with methane...

Bull(ock) power is common in India

[140Mandak262Jamuna (970587)]

Almost all the carts in India are drawn by bullocks (castrated bulls). Bullocks are used for irrigation, pressing oil out of seeds etc. They are trained to walk back and forth to draw water out of wells and to walk in circles to press oil. It is an eerie sight to drive on the rural roads in India late at night. The villagers cart their stuff to the nearest market towns, sell, watch a movie, get drunk and sleep in their carts. These bullocks are trained to walk home unaided. So you would come across this caravan of six or eight bullock carts, all obediently following the traffic rules (left side of the road) and plodding along. If you catch them going in opposite direction their eyes gleam eerily reflecting the headlamp. Always thought it would be a very simple thing to silently climb on to the leading cart, override the autopilot and drive the caravan to a secluded spot and rob the villagers. But somehow such crimes don't happen in rural India. (Other kinds of crimes do happen, don't want to paint too rosy a picture.)

It would be a trivial thing to gear up an oil press and drive a tiny generator to power a few laptops.

GNU

[yourexhalekiss (833943)]

You know, I bet you could use a gnu just as well as a cow. Same electrical power, higher meta factor.

"You're using a gnu to power a GNU-powered device? My mind just exploded!"

Being Thrifty

[WillRobinson (159226)]

After looking at the generator setup, this is something that would work. Generator from taxi's ready available cheep, a couple of front wheels from motorcycles also ready available. Ditto for 12 volt regulator and batteries. Driving farm animals around in a circle to run mills or other equipment for food processing has been done for centuries.

My question of this working is that I would expect the cow section to run probably 1 RPM. I would expect that the generator must turn somewhere above 400 rpm to put out a full 12 volts. (alternators usually above 700 rpm). So that is a pretty good gear ratio. Hence you see the double gear increase. Seems like it would be better to use a horse, which walks a bit faster, for several hours a day to charge the batteries instead of a cow.

The design needs improvement.

[140Mandak262Jamuna (970587)]

He is using a couple of bicycle wheels to increase the rpm to drive a truck alternator it looks like. Simple mechanism, easily maintained by the bicycle mechanics of an Indian village. This might find more applications too. Like charging their cell phones. A large part of rural India is still not on the national electric grid. Even the grid goes down sometimes in the rural areas. Most villages have this oil press powered by bullocks walking in a circular path (about 30 feet in diameter) dragging a yoke connected to a central pivot. They take a minute to finish a circuit. RPM=1. The gearing ratio from the picture appears to be 1: 60. (10x6). Not enough in my opinion to drive a standard truck alternator. Their efficiency peaks at around 1800 RPM. (I did a windmill for my undergrad project and I needed to gear it up to 1800 RPM to drive a truck alternator). Need to add another wheel set, not difficult to do.

Low-power laptop

[lobiusmoop (305328)]

The fact that the XO-1 was specifically designed to run on only 2-3 watts [wikipedia.org] (using Geode at 0.8 watts and LCD-backlit / reflective display at 0.1 to 1 watts), compared to the 15-20 watts on a normal laptop or 100-200 watts on a desktop makes this sort of thing quite feasible.

Torque

[Algorithmnast (1105517)]

When you consider the use of a cow vs. the use of a small animal (like a hamster) you start having to understand how we turn physical motion into electricity.

A small animal like a hamster is really cute, but they don't produce much usable electrical power. They only run long enough to get a workout, and if they get tired... they stop running. Yes, someone actually turned their hamster's wheel into a generator. [otherpower.com] The hamster could light up LEDs, but that's nowhere near powering a laptop.

A cow, on the other hand, will produce excellent torque - if you can get it to walk - but then you waste some of that power changing the low-amp high-volt power into higher-amp lower-volt power. Remember - pumping water is essentially a high-torque/low-speed process, but most electrical generation is low-torque/high-speed. (But that's because most electrical generation is for AC power, not the charging of DC batteries. For DC charging, high-torque/low-RPM might work nicely.)

However, what they're probably going for here isn't the optimal conversion of animal power to electrical power. What they're probably trying to do is transform into electricity what they perceive to be widely available power.

Re:Have you mooed today?

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Remember: To err is human, to moo is bovine.

Re:Finally!

[deftcoder (1090261)]

Try these commands, too:

aptitude moo
aptitude -v moo
aptitude -vv moo
aptitude -vvv moo
aptitude -vvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvvv moo

Moo.

Re:

[darthflo (1095225)]

To my knowledge, vegetarians don't eat meat while vegans won't eat meat, eggs, milk (yeah, I know milk is usually consumed by drinking, bug you can freeze and eat it.) and any other animal products. Therefore, not all vegetarians are vegans while all vegans are vegetarians.
Opposition against humans wearing animal fur, humans hurting animals, "anything that harms animals" as you say occurs within a similar subset of the human population, but is - as far as I know - not equal to veganism or vegetarianism.

Re:

[ZachPruckowski (918562)]

You might be joking, but Heifer International [heifer.org] isn't [heifer.org]. They give animals to low income third-world areas, and when the animals mate, they pass some of the offspring on to other poor people. My grandparents donate a Flock of Ducks [heifer.org] or Chicks [heifer.org] from every grandchild in our family at Christmas.