New Twist on Power Walking

An anonymous reader writes "Carrying a newly designed backpack loaded with between 44 and 84 pounds of gear, users generate enough electricity to simultaneously power an MP3 player, a PDA, night vision goggles, a handheld GPS, a CMOS image decoder, a GSM terminal in talk mode, and Bluetooth."

Uses

[FirienFirien]

While at the moment this is spawning a handful of standard amusing slashdot responses, you miss a more useful application - that of field operatives. And you can take 'field operatives' to mean soldiers and the like - being able to use all kinds of equipment that would normally require more power than is available should improve things, although bear in mind they already carry heavy packs so it wouldn't be one per person. The other kind is the more normal field operative - anyone who goes exploring/researching/hiking/prospecting... if you don't have to carry samples back to base camp for analysis, or can power *anything* enabling, then you're ddoing well with one of these. Remember that most people don't need the long list of things mentioned in the post; but for enabling people who are away from home, this looks like it could be really handy.

why bother

[k31dar]

Carrying between 44 and 84 pounds of backpack will negate the need to carry heavy batteries. So how heavy are batteries for MP3 players and PDA's these days?

Re:That would make you

[MichaelSmith]

Except they were wearing plain clothes, did not shout "police, stop!", he didn't run until after he'd picked up a newspaper, walked through the ticket bararier, and saw a train about to leave, same as any other london commuter

And the cop who had him pinned was as surprised as anybody else when the shots started.

And the shooter fired (apparently) an entire load. That's panic, not the work of a professional.

Re:why bother

[hey!]

Well, that all rather depends on how long you intend to listen, doesn't it?

IIRC Li ion batteries store 150 Wh/kg. 44 lb (the lower weight I guess of this unit) is about 20kg; if you were to use Li-ion batteries then this weight would buy you 3000 Wh of energy. Your break even depends on your load:

7w: 430 hours
1w: 3000 hours
100mw: 30,000 hours = 1250 days = 3.5 years.

Of course, if you are using individual cells, your weight efficiency isn't ideal, but you can discard them as you go along, reducing your load. But it's safe to say that if your planning on getting one of these as a post-apocalpytic magnet for music starved women, by the time you catch up to the guy with a backpack full of batteries the nubile ones will never have heard of an iPod. And you'll probably never catch up to the guy with a couple of strips of copper and zinc and ready access to a citrus grove.

Re:That would make you

[Guppy06]

"but the power of suggestion can be incredible,"

Double-edged sword. You can use it to claim it was the cause for changing their story afterward ("Blair is a bad, bad man!"), but I can use it to claim the story was flawed at the beginning ("Brown skinned people are trying to blow you up!")

I heard the same eye-witnesses, many of whom said he looked "Pakistani." He was Brazillian. Once they think they see someone who might try to blow them up, they can see a lot of things.