Everyone was handed out a generator. It was a small one (about the size of a flashlight), and it had a magnet inside of it.
This is kind of what it looked like.
In order to generate power to it, we had to shake it. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Oh wait, yes I have.
The Shake Weight might know something we don’t about power.
We took five measurements while my lab partner, Matt, shook the generator. First we measured zero shakes per measurement span in LabView. I think it was 30 seconds. Then we measured it at about 20, 40, 100, and 130 shakes. Here’s what the results look like on a graph:
[Click to Enlarge.]
As predicted, a higher number of shakes meant a higher voltage. These handheld generators don’t generate too much voltage, but they have real world applications. The flashlight one is a great idea for long-term power outages. However, I can’t see anyone powering a laptop or something like that by shaking something. That would create a muscle cramp quickly.
The Shake-Powered Generator experiment seemed like it was very fun and easy to run. The graphics you provided and comparison to the Shake weight made this post very easy to read and understand. Being able to take this blog and relate it to real life objects makes it much more relevant. The graph allows me to see the results of the project very clearly and shows the trend.