True to the saying “Build it and they will come,” I reported on Shawn Frayne’s Windbelt in my last post and boy, did they ever come. This is evidently the sort of thing that you, the public, are looking for, according to the number of comments that this article received as well as the number of referrals from Digg, StumbleUpon, Hugg, etc.
As an update to that article, I caught wind from the good people at Ecogeek that Shawn has started a company by the name of Humdinger Wind Energy to market his invention.
This may or may not be the case, but I’m hoping that the name of Frayne’s company reflects a move to rename the windbelts as “humdingers”, as in, “Man, that’s a fancy little humdinger you got there, charging your cellphone and powering your radio.”
A little background from the Humdinger site:
Shawn Frayne, a member of a team from MIT and Petite Anse working in the area, recognized that instead of kerosene lamps, white LEDs powered by a very inexpensive wind generator might be able to better light homes and schools in the area. However, when Shawn tried to design this affordable, turbine-based wind generator, he hit a brick wall: turbine technology is too inefficient at these scales to be a viable option.
It appears as though developer kits are coming soon as well, though details are sparse. Suffice to say, they will come in a box and be useful for “schools, researchers and independents…”
On a side note, here is short video of Shawn speaking at the recent Popular Mechanics Breakout Conference:
True indeed Shawn, we all do some of our best thinking when boxed into a corner.
If harder problems make for better inventions, we are living in some exciting times.
- Curtiss Martin
