“Maximizing Sweat Equity” Project Converts Sweat to Battery Charge on Adafruit Forums
Here’s a very unusual battery project shared by Misha Rabinovich on the Adafruit Forums:
In the end this worked out beautifully. We made a sweat battery out of about 150 cells! We evolved the aluminum air battery design to use a sweat-soaked paper towel instead of a vat of sweat. We grouped our cells in secondary groups of 8 to get the voltage up to about 5v, and then put 19 groups in parallel. The first day of the exhibition we had about a whole amp of power coming out! The half life of the power is about a day, mainly because of the evaporation of water from the paper towel. We rehydrated the primary cells and got the battery to power the mintyboost and charge cell phones during the whole weeklong exhibition.
It was great, thanks for this excellent kit! Big props for making the board perfectly sized for Altoids smalls tin instead of the big one.
Photos and how-to pdf with drawings of Baghdad batteries and our batteries on our blog here.
Video interviews with us about our presentation at the Ideas City festival put on by the New Museum here.
We presented our mobile sauna in New York City and got a very great reception. People used our sauna and volunteered their sweat. We turned this sweat into electrical batteries on the spot and charged our cell phone. Here is the instruction sheet we presented to explain how it works. The full instruction PDF is here: Maximizing Sweat Equity How-to
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
