USB Tutorial: Charge Any USB Gadget With Your Bike

The world is going Green.  This is your chance to keep those USB gadgets, yet charge them without consuming electricity and leaving your carbon footprint.  The idea behind this USB tutorial is taking the kinetic energy of your bike and turn that into re-powering any USB gadget.

I found this fun little project off the Instructables website.  Apparently the author received some grant funds from Lemelson-MIT program and put together a team of 6 students to create this solution.

The team got their idea from shake-up flashlights which are based off the Faraday Principle – which is a type of electromagnetism reaction to generate energy.

You will need to get a bread-board and create a small circuit to capture the energy produced by the bike and turn it towards your USB gadget.

Next, you’ll need a motor provider that will actually “capture” the energy, feed it through your newly made circuit.  There are many options for this, check ebay or buy one [range from $90 - $275].

Finally, you’ll need to build something to store your gadget, it seems this tutorial used some PVC from the local hardware store which fit nicely into the water bottle holder of the mountain bike.

It’s a bit of an involved project, but a sweet result once you are done.

Source:  Instructables.