A flashlight that works by air movement

Imagine that in the apartment turned off the light. You are in the dark groping for a flashlight in the tool box ... and he has batteries! Worse situation and difficult to imagine.

This was probably the case with South Korean engineer Tim Cho (Tim Cho). He made a simple flashlight, in which you need to blow, like a whistle. Podul - and the LED has earned.


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Tim Cho with his flashlight-whistle won the first place in the engineering competition "Catch the Wind", which was arranged by the company MakerBot, a manufacturer of 3D printers.

The design of the flashlight is quite simple. Even a cheap 3D printer is suitable for its production.



The author designed the design in the program Autodesk Inventor. The lantern consists of 15 individual parts. Printing each of them took about 30 minutes with a layer height of 0.2 mm and a fill density of 25%. After spending seven and a half hours to print, he assembled them together and added electronic components: coils, magnets, a diode bridge, a LED, wires, etc.

If you strongly blow into the hole, then the built-in mini-turbine starts to rotate along with the generator magnets. Then the generator coils generate alternating current (AC). A diode bridge converts alternating current into direct current (DC). Depending on the volume of the lungs and the muscles of a person, the voltage in the DC circuit ranges from 0.5 to 1 volt. In order for the LED to light up, you need at least 3 volts. Therefore, the engineer had to use the booster “voltage boost” (Joule thief).



Flashlight print files are published in the Thingiverse directory .