Make A Human Powered Phone Charger

Make your own human powered generator to charge your phone. via instructables

Mobile phones / Tablets have become an integral part of our life. One big hustle which every mobile user faces is charging the device. Well if you have a power source like AC wall supply or batteries lying around then it is easy but what if you are stuck in a place where there is no power source, like for few days?

I got this idea when a cyclone struck my area and we had no power in the whole city for like 10 days. The phone towers started working from the 2nd day itself but since our smart phone’s charging doesn’t last more than a day or two, it was of no use. That’s when I realised how dependent we are on electricity provided by power stations.

This project will help your phone stay alive in those kind of situations. Remember, my objective is to make a charger with parts which will easily be available.

What we don’t want to use: Batteries, AC household power

What we want to use: Muscle Power (Mechanical Energy)

Solution : DC Motor/Dynamo

I’ll be using a DC motor in this tutorial since it is more easily available than a dynamo. Well technically a DC motor is also a DC generator so when you apply mechanical energy to a DC motor (rotate it’s shaft), it produces some amount of power.

But we have another problem. Depending on the speed at which we rotate the shaft, the voltage across the terminals vary and we don’t want anything above +5 volts for our USB charging. So we need a regulator block which would take in the variable power from the motor and convert it into DC +5V

Full tutorial


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