Week Three

Weekly Objectives:

A majority of this week is dedicated to ordering the parts that we will need, and waiting for them to get here. While we wait for this, we are going to refine the design of the housing and also the electrical system as much as possible. Along with this, we are also going to try to schedule a meeting with someone in the Fashion Design program to being talking with them about our jacket design.

What was accomplished:

The fans

The fans that we had ordered to use for this project had arrived this week. During the lab period, we decided to test them to make sure their motors would produce enough voltage to charge any phone. We know that we would need a voltage of 5 volt and an amperage of 1amp to charge a phone in what would be considered a "normal time." [1] Unfortunately when testing the motors, we found that they would only produce around 0.1V. even if we used four of these fan's motors, they could only produce around 0.4V, which is not enough to charge a phone. We tested the generating ability of the motors by running it into a multimeter, and then manually blowing the fan blades. This was the easiest way for us to test whether or not the motors would be usable.

We wanted to figure out why they would not work well enough, and came to the realization that the fans that we ordered are 12V, 4500 revolutions per minute (rpm) fans. This means that to produce their maximum voltage, 12V, we would have to get them to spin at 4500 rpm. It is unrealistic to expect this to happen using wind. What we realized we really needed was a high voltage fan, with a low rpm. We researched these types of fans, and were able to find a fan that runs 24V at 2500 rpm. We hope that this will be able to produce enough voltage be able to produce enough. This fan can be found here.

What we can take away from this experience, is that we need to do a better job of calculating expected values, before ordering, and make sure that we are confident in what we need to order before we order it.

The Jacket

We also reached out to the head of the fashion design college through email to see if she could help us with design and construction, or refer us to someone who could. We have not received a response email yet. If she does not respond soon, we will probably send her a follow up email, ,or try to contact someone else.



[1]     Finch, Lawrence. "Everything You Wanted To Know About Charging Your iPhone Or iPad". Apple. N.p., 2017. Web. 1 May 2017.

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