We’ve reported on portable solar chargers before, and they’re effective, but their achilles heel will always be their reliance on the sun.
Which means: No sun, little power. Plus, if you’re hiking all day and setting up camp at dusk, forget catching enough rays to juice any of your devices.
What you need is wind.
And who you need to see for that is Nils Ferber, the grad student at the Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland who cleverly engineered a fix with his micro wind turbine, which you can run through the night while you sleep.
The ingenious device looks like mini-ship sails fashioned to a single pole and powers your device by spinning around. And it’s incredibly portable: it’s 40 percent lighter than solar and other wind turbines and collapses to the size of a hiking pole.
Ferber will debut it at the Grand Grad Show at Dubai Design Week on October 24-29, 2016.
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