We started out coming up with ideas for how to generate power from physical body movements. We brainstormed many ideas with Sydney and Ariana and narrowed our idea down to a way to generate power through steps. When searching for videos we found this, an animation with a car driving over pads on the street which powered street lights. The pressure plate pushed on a rack which turned a pinion into a generator. We started to work on this idea for our project, and prototyped a Lego model of what we wanted it to look like functionally.
Later we went on Amazon and bought a hand-crank generator (e-Ton) to use as our generator. We took it apart and measured the hand crank dimensions in order to replicate the inside of the crank in TinkerCAD, a 3D model creator tool. We made this in order to be able to screw in any gears or any other things we would use to have crank the generator. Our original plan was to connect a cone-shaped gear to it so we could use the rack-and-pinion idea that we saw in the animation.
We set to work on the housing for our project after that in order to figure out the specifics on the way to transfer the energy from the steps to a generator. We got a few pieces of plywood and constructed a wooden box to hold our generator system as you see it now, opting to use hinges on one side of the platform which depresses, and a row of 4 springs on the other side of it.
We brainstormed ideas for attaching the e-Ton to the platform, and we realized that we could accomplish energy-generation part of our project much easier than using the rack-and-pinion method by using the original handle provided with the e-Ton generator. We attached it by gluing the e-Ton box itself to the side of the box of the platform and trapping the hand crank in a metal "box."
We attached the handle of the e-Ton to the top of the pressure plate, and as the springs push it up it rotates the crank handle. Using the e-Ton generator as our power generation made it a lot easier to connect devices in order to power them (via USB).
We read on the box for the e-Ton that a minute of cranking will power four minutes of talk time on a smartphone. We figure that the up and down motion from the PowerMat will reduce the cranking, but we aren’t sure by how much. The PowerMat’s original intentions were to be for a pencil vending machine, but can be used for many other things. For example, one could use the PowerMat to jump on while watching TV in order to power their phone. With the PowerMat, the possibilities are endless.