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On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 03:01:38AM +1200, Russell McMahon wrote:
> This is essentially a  micro scale version of eg mechanical automatic 
> watches which have been around for many decades. Different "vibration" 
> source- essentially same principle. Could be useful but that's an 
> extremely low power level (40 uW).

If I've got my units right, that's still a little more than 10x more
power than you can get out of a usual, 10 year, 1uA lithium battery,
3.3uW.

Of course, I'm holding out for widely available radioisotope cells... Or
those fancy direct conversion tritium decay based cells that I've read
about. Directly converting the alpha partical decay into electroncs and
capturing them. Tritium is remarkably non-toxic stuff for a nuclear
material. It dissipates into the environment very quickly, has a very
short biological half-life, and is naturally present in quantities far
higher than we can produce, so the "solution to pollution is dilution"
thing actually works out...

I wonder how much power is my little tritium glowlight dissipating
anyway?

- -- 
http://petertodd.org
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