Productdesignteam8

Here are the minutes: https://blogs.epfl.ch/productdesignteam8/documents/Minutes/Minutesmeeting11.pdf

Updates after the tests with the coil:
Energy production: about 5mW  / 20mW per coil. (walking / running)
Versus energy consumption of the LED: 600mW / 60mW (power safe)

Additionally, the conversion electronics consume a lot, result: no power left for the LED.

Find solutions:
- Loic: Find out how to easily replace the LED by a less consuming LED / modify the driving circuit to have different duty cycles
-Micha: Check a low-power chip dedicated to energy harvesting. Check if it's still possible to do a last-minute PCB. The boost we chose sucks (new product on the market), even for normal battery applications it leaks too much. Give a bad feedback on mouser. Implement solution on the PCB for disabling the electronics when we don't need them.

Our technology still has a future, it's very innovative passive energy harvesting. There is more research to do!

Find attached the minutes of our third session:

MinutesMeeting3.pdf

We decided to go with a magneto-inductive method for the energy harvesting part of our project. The idea being, that with this method it is possible to collect energy "passively" (e.g. from a walking person), as well as "actively" (e.g. shaking the device). Therefor this method leaves a bigger design space, even though it's less efficient than a simple crank mechanism.

We will now do some more profound theoretical calculations to evaluate the harvesting potential of this method and to decide on the dimensions of the device. We will then proceed in creating a first engineering model, to prove the theoretical values.

We split up our team in small groups that will advance sub parts of the project.

Here you find the minutes of session 1:

Minutes Session 1

And this article about energy harvesting strategies could be helpful:

Energy harvesting strategies