Tree power?

[rjvh]

Slightly less cute, but much more practical, is to use a small single cell and drive an led with a joule thief. Hollow out an orange and hide it in there. Much longer life.

That's cheating

you can also use chrismas lights and burry the cable

Robert-Jan

 

[HarveyH42]

It was suppose to be a small, cheap, and highly portable device that I could quickly install anywhere in town with a citrus tree. A fully charged battery will run down in about a week, three days with a fading RGB. Anyway, the rainy season is here, so expect some rapid growth from the oranges. My dog knock off a small pineapple yesterday (the best one, of course). It's at least 2 months premature, so going to experiment on it. Hope the other two make it to the end of summer.

 

[mneary]

A fully charged battery will run down in about a week, three days with a fading RGB.

Before getting your hopes up, it would be a good idea to clock the amount of energy that you'd expect from a couple of electrodes in a citrus fruit. I haven't tried, but my guess is a AAA battery will be at least 10x better.

 

[HarveyH42]

Before getting your hopes up, it would be a good idea to clock the amount of energy that you'd expect from a couple of electrodes in a citrus fruit. I haven't tried, but my guess is a AAA battery will be at least 10x better.

That's pretty much the challenge. The Joule Thief will light an LED, with as little as 0.3 volts. The AA and AAA batteries have a very limited life. The citrus fruit battery should produce until the electrodes are covered in oxidation crud. How long will they last? Have to wait and see.

 

[Hero999]

A single 20A SLA cell shoud keep an LED going for over a month but you'll need to make some sort of low voltage disconnect to cut the power when it drops below 1.75V or your cell will die.

 

[arrie]

Here in good old SA we eat them fruit. Maybe not always because we have a choice, but because Escom (Eish..com) have cut the power, load-shedding, (again) and we cannot cook any food.
Maybe I should give you guys my PO Box and ask to post some of that nice fruit to me, we cannot even buy a bloody orange for any amount of cents, and every month the bloody price of an orange increases, enough to make you choke when you bite that precious orange.
The oranges are so freekin expensive, one feels like framing it and hanging it against the wall in the dinning room, staring at it every night, especially just before the bloody power goes off again. When the power goes off there is also no water, because the pumps cannot pump water from the boreholes we live off. And one cannot even go to sleep, because all the married women in the neighbourhood are crying because they cannot watch desperate housewives. And not to mention the smell, all surrage stations are overflowing impairing my ability to sleep also.
Needless to say, in some areas of SA, there is a population boom due to the power-shedding, and people retiring to bed early, which just adds to the power problems, but the government has the solution, we'll build more coal power stations, three in the next 15 years.
Halloooo, anyone out there, we do not have enough coal to run the existing power stations. While all this is going on, we're selling power to neighbouring countries at a fraction of what we charge our own citizens, where these governments are killing its own people, living in multi million dollar palaces while its people die of hunger and disease.
Hope you guys enjoy poking metal strips into fruit now.
I'll go sit in the corner and cry now.


Just a bit of humour, drama and sadness for you serious brainy guys out there.
Most of what I've said previously is true, some blown up some, but nothing a lie.
sleep tight