Pleech Video Capture

The Pringles Wind Turbine (a.k.a. Power Leech or Pleech) is an attempt to turn simple items found at the hardware store and elsewhere into a working low-voltage power supply. It is also the process for creating the turbine, designed so that other people may reproduce the product themselves.

Final paper pdf is attached below. The accompanying website for the instructable is here.

The Pleech Instructable appeared on the MAKE: Blog today.

This is great for the project. One of the points I drove home during my presentation was that I wanted the Pleech to be as much about the process of building one and sharing improvements with people as it is the end product. Hopefully wider public exposure will help bring more people into this process and start a good debate on the best way to build things like this.

Attached below is my final presentation PDF for the Design and Psychology class. My experiment was to review how users interacted with Psiphon and to see how anxiety may have affected their performance on a simple interface task.

I had a great time at the Mobilized conference this past weekend. I taught a brief workshop on Sydewynder to the folks there, and I got a pretty good response. Here's a Flickr photo from the event:

Thanks again to Paul Notzold for sharing his computer and running

It is finished:

Pringles Wind Turbine (Pleech) - Version One

Well, actually, it's only just now getting started, really. The instructable is part of a hopefully ongoing process for refining the Pleech concept by harnessing the power of the instructables community. It's only been up for a few hours and already has a fan! Woowee!

Lovely flag:
Free Speech Flag: The free speech flag, whose colors are: #09F911 #029D74 #E35BD8 #4156C5 #635688. Thanks to badmouth.net for that.

And now it's time for a little more freedom of speech:

0nce upon a time, there were 9 little fairies. These 9 could cast wonderful spe11s that could unlock any secret and reveal the magic of any st0ry.

But, one day, 2 ogres, claiming to represent the storytellers, entered the land of the 9 fairies, the magestic Free Woods. For 7 years, the ogres made it 4bidden to tell stori3s or to even 5peak. These bad creatures even 8 up all the magic m4ch1nes that the fairie5 used to work their craft.

Then, one day, 6 adventurers came from over the Publik Hill5. These 6 h3ros 5lew the bad ogres. Then the 6 held a great feast for everyone, where people could listen to their own stories, view their own movies, use their own software. They feasted and 8 and 8 and no more were corporate ogres heard from again.

0, what a lovely story that was!

Groklaw - 2 Major Patent Rulings from the US Supreme Court - [My del.icio.us]

Finally, finally, FINALLY some sanity from on high about our screwed up patent system. This is the money quote from one of the decisions:

And as progress beginning from higher levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.

Just some more data for you from yesterday's events. Here's me at the end of the table studiously assembling my MintyBoost:

Image licensed under the CC-BY-NC-ND. Thanks to pt for the image.

And here's me with a completed ShakeLight:

Me With Human Power DIY Flashlight: This is the human-power flashlight I built with a partner, who had never soldered before and did a great job, at the Bent Festival at Eyebeam.

I went to the Bent Festival at Eyebeam today--sorta. I didn't do the music--noise music makes me want to stick icepicks in both ears and both eyes. In fact, I think the Max/MSP teachers at Parsons next semester should hoist noise "musicians" out the window until they apologize for making our collective heads compress every time yet another one "discovers" how to modulate sawtooth waves with the fucking serial-in off a potentiometer circuit. It's a trick--get an ax.

I digress.

The classes I went to were fantastic and related very well to the user research I am doing for my Pleech project. The first was for a build of the MintyBoost, taught by its inventor, Limor Fried. Not only is it charging my wife's iPod as I write this (thanks for the guinea pig, hon!), it has the right kind of electronics (1.5V to 4.5V in, 5.0V out, 350mA max) that could power the kind of devices I'm interested in. This could be the supply end of the Pleech, minus the two AA batteries.

This week, I started building the prototype of my Pleech, the power leeching wind turbine.

The first thing I did was to assemble all the parts I could find. These included:

Pringles Can (cut lengthwise)

Two Used CDs

Chrome Paper Towel Holder

5/8 in. Dowel: (cut to length with two nails driven into each side and snipped to make a needle bearing)

8 Ceramic Magnets: (oriented in alternating North/South configuration)

400 Ft. 30 gauge magnet wire: (made into 8 loops of approx 275 2 in. windings)

Various Electronics: (including a bridge rectifier)

With these pieces together, I began the assembly process.