Great stuff Zach. Thanks for sharing that.

I've played with similar ideas. What I refer to as "passive effects" which are effects that require no power. Fun stuff. Coils, inductors, and transformers are one way to make passive effects. Ansil's write up on the Black Ice / Diodes on the guitar signal is another.

Andrew

How bout just slappin a couple of solar panels on the front of your axe?  They look cool enough... what more could you ask for?

Anyone try using one of those 8 or 4 ohm to 1k miniature audio tranny's. If you apply a 9 volt pulse to the secondary you get 300 vdc out on the primary. If you rectify the ac from your guitar pickups and say get 100mv that should provide 3 volts or more. These tranny's are even available at radio shack.

There is actually lots on the net on inductive coupling and charging. Looking at an electric toothbrush that has  inductive charging. Applying the technology on a smaller scale may work.Also I wonder about extracting rf voltage from the guitar strings and rectifying that along with the tranny. Possibly use all this power for lighting an led which in turn can utilize a solar cell previously mentioned.

 I originally mentioned this in the richardson forum which seems to randomly appear and disappear :x

the loss of efficiency and destruction of the tone of the pickups are always involved in connecting the pickup's output to any device that attempts to extract useful electrical energy.  the total wattage available from a guitar pickup is nearly negligible... think about it... it can barely provide about 50mV average across a 250,000 ohm potentiometer before the signal begins to deteriorate.  so even if you could extract all of that energy without disturbing the guitar's signal any further, look at the numbers:

while playing,


current:
E=IR
.05V=I*250,000
.05/250,000 =I
.0000002 amps =I
.0002 mA=I

power
P=IA
P=.0000002A*.05 V
P=.00000001 watt=.01 microwatts.

now in my very most efficient effect, the Woolly Mammoth, current draw is less than .5mA at 9 Volts, for a whopping 9*.0005=4,500 microwatts.  

look at the difference.  a pickup can safely generate .01 microwatts, while a very efficient pedal needs half-a-million times that much in order to operate.  even if you factor in errors of a couple of magnatudes... let us say that you were running a pedal on 1.5 V (it's possible... the old maestro fuzz-tones did this) and so got the power needs down by a factor of 100, to 45 microwatts, and then you loaded down the guitar pickup by a factor of 100 to extract more power and simply ignored the fact that the guitar's pickup was going to start sounding terribly dull and lose all sustain, making it generate say 1 microwatt, you see we're still off by a factor of 50.  it's a labor of constantly diminishing returns.  we end up back at the same juncture as was reached by all of the science-minded posters before... you can't get something for nothing.

so, the solution is to either create such an efficient transformer-based system that you can eliminate the need for active components in your pedal, like i did, or to mount solar cells on your pedals and store the output in rechargable batteries inside.  you only need 1.5 volts to power certain types of pedals.  you can easily string up four sets of silicon solar cells on top of a pedal and keep one of those charged with available light.  you could probably extract an average of 45 mW from a set of cells like that.  check out these stats:

http://www.jameco.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prmenbr=91&prrfnbr=354459&cgrfnbr=501&ctgys=

Voltage: 2.0; current 200mA
Size: 3.0"L x 3.7"W x 0.2" Thick

now obviously that's in full sunlight, but 3X3.7 is probably smaller than the available area on the top of a 1590BB, and 2 volts can certainly power germanium transistors, and well, lookie there!  2 volts times .2 A is 400 mW of power in full sun, which probably drops down to one tenth or more of that inside under house lights.  so you can get an average of 40 mW out of solar cells that would fit on top of your 1590BB box?  think about it.  i wonder if you could plug that 2 volts into a maxim voltage-doubling chip?  well, so did this robot-maker.  check out this site (complete with movies) for a solar-powered light-seeking robot.  if you built your pedal into one of these, it could find its own light source when you weren't using it, recharging for later use.  8^)

z

http://www.robotroom.com/XSBoost.html

dang z i got to talk toyou more offten i was building some simlpe robots in high school and i used to add robtoic arms and stuff to toyz when i was  a kid..

i've never built them.  i just did a search and discovered some remarkable similarities between what this guy is trying to do and the idea of this thread... to power pedals for free.

well still u seem interesting man..

Those solar panels are quite impressive. How bout a special high output pickup that is wired out of the guitars volume and tone circuit (dummy pickup) designed for off the scale output, eliminating tone problems powering low forward voltage mini leds which in turn provide light for the panels to work. Maybe highly reflective materials in the cavity to aid the light dissipation.

Trick being to get one panel supplying even more power for the next stage of high brightness leds. Of course I haven't checked to see the current requirements of todays ultra mini low forward voltage leds, but I do know they exist. If all this did work it would have to charge a battery of some type or charge a cap or two for when the voltage level drops.

You are right when it comes to manipulating transformers. There is plenty of room for experimentation . I  ended up with a power free octave device that did work great , unfortunately it did require quite the driving voltage to work properly but it did track perfectly with excellant decay and I may quietly market it yet.

You could use batteries or have alittle more fun and use large capcitors like say oh...a Fered.

Take a look at what kind of effect you might want to build. There are obvious ones that you shouldn't bother with like boasters but there are other lower power effects that you could make.

When I started playing with passive and lower/self power effects  trying various ideas I got a few pointers for a robot guy I know named Mark Tilden.

Andrew

Dead links, Zach!
Interesting though... got some left?
*edit*
10M inputs? I hope you like Russian radio

I actually had an almost-perfect feedback situation like that:
stand this way: octave
stand this way: fifth
stand this way: fifth octave
stand this way: back to octave (by this time I'm thinking I'm way cool and getting looks from the band)
stand this way: Polish/Russian (sorry if I offend anyone, I just dont speak the lingo) radio. What the *^%#$@? Back to:
stand this way; octave. Good. Move again: radio. Dang.

dead links?  no, neither of the links i posted above are dead.  they both work perfectly... jameco goes to the solar cell page i chose, and the robot one goes right to that page.

The Jameco and robot links work, but the two harmony central links are now dead.

Is that what you were referring to Mike?

Take care,
-Peter

i guess they only last for so long.

Now I don't want to get serious on a humourous thread, but I saw something a while back that got me thinking.

Stepper motors are throw-away items in ald typewriters, printers, etc.  They also put out a fair bit of power if you spin them.  I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out how to spin them while playing an Ebmaj7-13th chord.

The other easily tappable power source is from all that carbo that you ate all day.  Yep, your body puts out about 50W (I think) of heat.  To work out how to tap that energy source, check out Peltier devices and thermocouples on Google.  An added piece of trivia is that your head puts out HEAPS of convertable heat, so maybe Ansil will invent a hat-powered pedal for us.

(Does anybody else have this thing where you can remember all this dumb-ass trivial stuff, but can't remember where you parked your car?)

ah yes... like being able to remember half a billion electronic part numbers and equations, but forgeting your girlfriends birthday every year without fail!?!?!

... no, I don't have that "thing"... nope, not me...

Quote from: brett
The other easily tappable power source is from all that carbo that you ate all day.  Yep, your body puts out about 50W (I think) of heat.  To work out how to tap that energy source, check out Peltier devices and thermocouples on Google.  An added piece of trivia is that your head puts out HEAPS of convertable heat, so maybe Ansil will invent a hat-powered pedal for us.

(Does anybody else have this thing where you can remember all this dumb-ass trivial stuff, but can't remember where you parked your car?)

lol i guess i will have to do that. i did actually come up with a way to make a battery powerd fan in my shoes recharge the batterie off of the heat, but i had a little help with that. i got some wicked hot feet..

Ever since I heard MC Hawking's "Entropy," it always pops into my head whenever conservation of energy is discussed. So, on the subject of "you can't get something for nothing:"


You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.


Edit: I should probably say in advance that MC Hawking is a joke site whose concept, using the speech synthesizer voice (AT&T's?) Steven Hawking uses to do gangster rap, seems and may be offensive to some here. However, it's pretty popular at many physics departments; I heard it from my friend who had just finished his undergrad work.
Supposedly Steven Hawking himself has heard and enjoyed the songs, but I just felt a disclaimer was necessary.

ok, more crazy schemes...

I'm picturing a small, gas burning power plant, built into a backpack.  This is an energy conversion utility, if you will.  Baked beans provide the raw energy source and the human digestive tract does the complex chemical conversion needed to provide the turbines with methane...

Perhaps this is better suited to attachement to the roadies and crew.  On a big enough show (like The Rolling Stones) you could possibly power not just the pedals but the amp walls as well!

well it isnt' exactly diy, but i have been working with hv and water to split  it into its two primary gasses  so making a hydrogen fuel cell would be interesting hmm but it could explode so well better be carefull lol

I was checking out piezo crystals and was pretty surprised at some of the info. Check this out on a BATTERY FREE radio transmitter/reciever that has a range of 300 meters.

http://www.memsnet.org/news/1048517334-1/