Horizon's Cheap Personal Fuel Cell Now On Sale—Charge Gadgets Cleanly and Cheaply [Fuel Cells]

First seen at CES years ago, Horizon's MiniPak has (finally) gone on sale for $100. It's the first personal, portable fuel cell—if you don't count the Japan-only Toshiba one—and is like a mini power plant for charging gadgets.

It eats refillable cartridges (coming bundled with two), with each cartridge giving the equivalent of 1,000 AA batteries. At $100, you can see it's going to end up saving you quite a bit of money. Not to mention help save the environment, with fuel cells being a clean and cheap way to generate energy. More on that can be explained here.

A bunch of connectors are included, so your smartphone/gaming console/other portable device should be supported, with up to 2W of power surging through a USB port. It's dead-small too, fitting in the palm of your hand, only slightly larger than the object you're charging up.


[Gizmodo via MiniPak via GizMag]

Tiny supercharger is like 10 wind turbines in one [Green Energy]

What if there were a palm-size charger that gathered power from the wind? A company called Humdinger says its Microbelt small-scale wind charger actually works, and it's 10 times more effective at generating wind energy than other units its size.

Where is the turbine, you ask? There isn't one — it uses "aeroelastic flutter and vibration of a membrane" for its wind power, operating sort of like that blade of grass you put between your thumbs to honk out some choice noises.

The amount of energy created by this diminutive device is minuscule — but it's efficient, outputting 2 milliwatts when the wind is blowing at 5.5 meters per second. That's enough power to run building monitoring and transit monitoring sensors; with one of these, there'd be no need to ever change batteries. Put a few dozen of these on an electric car, and you'll have something pretty close to a perpetual-motion machine.

[DVICE via Treehugger]

RCA Airnergy Charges Gadgets with Nothing But Wifi Signals [Chargers]

Forget PowerMats and wireless charging and the like, because the Airnergy wi-fi signal harvester is my new front runner for the future of gadget charging.
It's not exactly new tech, as ohGizmo notes, but it's the first application that's of any real use to consumers. Put simply, Airnergy takes the energy created by wi-fi signals and stores it in a rechargeable battery. At CES, the device was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes.


Pretty handy, and supposedly available this summer for $40. Not too shabby, and very appealing considering how ubiquitous wi-fi hotspots are these days. Very simple, somewhat cheap and incredibly useful if it works are advertised—by far one of the coolest things I've seen come out of CES this year. [OhGizmo]