Volts are always easy to get. Comb your hair and you generate tens of thousands of volts due to triboelectricity.
You can get volts out of a resistor due to thermal noise. Power is hard to get. Thermal power can be calculated: Enough resistors and you have perpetual energy. A loud speaker will produce measurable power from ambient noise. Vibrations. Changes in temperature and barometric pressure can be exploited too. There are clocks that are powered that way. From: Nate Burke Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2015 3:20 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] dumb curiosity question Didn't the mythbusters do this in a really really early season? They ended up getting a fraction of a volt out of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%282004_season%29#Free_Energy On 1/8/2015 4:15 PM, Chuck McCown wrote: Possibly. Totally depends on the strengths of the signals. Close to high power transmitters, yes. But that means broadcast transmitters like TV and FM. If you have a 100 watt cell phone transmitter right outside your window, you might be able to do it but I would not want to live there. Being near anything broadcasting 25 kW or more it would be easy. NEAR is the important word. From: That One Guy Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2015 2:47 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: [AFMUG] dumb curiosity question With the amount of RF always traveling through the air, in an average urban environment if a guy has some magic antenna to stick up and capture everything flowing through tha point in space, could you steal that energy and charge a cellphone? -- All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. -- IBM maintenance manual, 1925
