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  • Hacker News
  • When I was at Peloton a long time ago, someone proposed an April Fools’ joke where we could announce a dynamo add-on that would let you power your house from your bike.

    The math isn’t as bad as you might think: 200Wh (about a 60 min, somewhat intense ride) seems to be about 20 minutes for a H/B100. Still 3x, but not bad at all!

    I remember the idea being dismissed quickly because people would likely actually want it.

    by ggamecrazy
  • 200W is pretty good FTP for an "untrained" cyclist. FTP is the maximum you can sustain for a single hour, but you're not going to do multiple back-to-back.

    Obviously the peloton crowd is biased towards people who will have better endurance and higher FTP, but basically the upshot is you could run one card for one hour with the effort of a 100km long ride which most recreational cyclists do once a week.

    by hdndjsbbs
  • I bet if you took one of Taalas' cards which consumes 200 watts for 14,000 tokens/second [0] and slowed it down by a factor of 10, it would actually be quite reasonable to power by bicycle.

    [0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...

    by piinbinary
  • > We chose a cheap off-the-shelf switchable voltage 20W hand-crank generator marketed for emergency USB charging. The Pi normally draws around 1.5A, but when it’s working hard (as it does when doing inference on the CPU), its current requirements can increase substantially, causing the generator voltage to sag below the Pi’s required 4.8V or even, in the case of a momentary 5A spike, to trigger the generator’s internal overcurrent protection and shut off the voltage output entirely, causing the Pi to brown out.

    > To ensure the Pi sees a steady voltage when the full inference stack kicks in (and to afford crankers a little rest), we built a custom capacitor board [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zv_Hsinvx_sWtdur4iWY...] to smooth out the generator’s output and act as a short-term (~20 second) power reservoir.

    Somewhat off-topic, but could this capacitor board work with a small-ish 5V USB solar panel? I'm not great with electronics, but it seems like just the solution for a device I want to run with the panel.

    My vague impression was it's not kosher per the USB spec to just stick a capacitor across the supply to even out the brown-outs, but this looks like it's doing some other stuff.

    by palmotea
  • Playdate (the came console) is amazing for this! I was really bored once and built a Claude Code remote control for Playdate.

    Voice recognition was done via parrot + handy.computer Basically: different key combos were tied to different actions, e.g. \

        - hold A to speak
    - move the crank slowly to navigate
    - crank super fast to send the prompt
    Eventually this became a universal remote control for the computers in my home (YAML file with bindings from Playdate UI → A11y events). Using the crank to control movies is fun!

    (I can share the source -- just let me know if this is actually useful)

    Also, I feel like the author and me have similar hobbies. A few years back I almost won a (re-sellable on Ebay) award for https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io !

    (I lost to a gallery of 3d sandwiches)

    by rpastuszak
  • I have one too and it never occurred to me to use it for anything other than games. Would be interested in seeing how you did it!
    by anana_
  • I really wanted to like the Playdate but it's such an unbelievably overpriced and underspecced toy. But the crank, which really looked like a gimmick, is oddly quite nice to have and I wish my kids' Retro Arcade had one.
    by Waterluvian
  • Not sure it's possible to say this without being pithy, but haven't there been stories told, perhaps TV episodes and films made, regarding the concept of using human bodies to generate power in support of machine intelligence?

    Seems a little on the nose to me, but I guess some days it's hard to tell what's a gag and what's a legit pitch.

    by soylentcola
  • Well, the Matrix did this. Badly. "Machines who have developed nuclear power are using human bodies as batteries"-level badly.
    by JKolios
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
    by donpdonp
  • As a bit of an aside, I really like the idea of trying to design things with the constraint of it having to be able to run off a hand-crank.

    I feel like it is not only an interesting engineering challenge but one that might lead to a more efficient and sustainable framing.

    by jszymborski
  • I would love a crank-powered router. Would be a good way to curb internet addiction!
    by nemo1618
  • It's not more sustainable though. It takes more energy to grow the food to get the calories to metabolize to turn the crank than it would to run an electric motor or a engine to do the same work.
    by hollerith
  • In a similar vein, the solar-powered website. [0]

    [0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/

    by Terr_
  • Or we could... hear me out... build more power plants. The de-growth stuff is pretty evil when you take it to it's logical conclusion of population control.
    by bko
  • instead of complaining about the website, which wouldn't be allowed, i am just going to link this much better reading experience instead: https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/ (from the "technical documentation" link at the bottom of that... page thing)
    by john_strinlai
  • I gave up on that page halfway through and just came here to read comments. Can't be bothered with this stuff anymore. Thanks for the link!
    by theSuda
  • We are in a state of the world where I don't know of it's a satire or a future actual product.
    by Foobar8568
  • They raised $100M. /s
    by utopiah
  • "Is this real?" launches a pretty realistic looking demo video. Hard to say these days though.
    by josefresco
  • "Tech companies have quietly abandoned their climate pledges to build gas-burning power plants that feed your favorite AI."

    What I love is this quote is super-imposed with a background image that has gas-burning smokestacks but also nuclear cooling towers in the same field.

    This is a bit representational of this particular line of protest against AI - just super confused about it all and thrashing out.

    Green energy has been (technologically) solved, but instead we want to go back to manual labor as a source of power? Hilarious.

    by pj_mukh
  • Not only nuclear power plants have cooling towers. Here [1] is, for example, a coal-fired one in Poland.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station#/medi...

    EDIT: To elaborate a bit, if you are burning oil or gas in a turbine, you do not need a cooling tower, the waste heat goes into the atmosphere with the exhaust. If you use fossil or nuclear fuels to produce steam for a steam turbine, you either need a river with enough flow to not boil all the fish if you reject the waste heat into it or you need a cooling tower to reject the heat into the atmosphere.

    by danbruc
  • I can do high level thinking for around 6 hours with just two scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee.

    What I need is something to prevent me from context drift. /starts googling how many scrambled eggs are equivalent to the energy consumed by a data center. Google how many chickens are in the world.../

    by estebarb
  • I find AI helps a lot with my context drift (or attention deficit). I can now simply burst type questions one after another in a large prompt, then have the AI do all the relevant searches / data collections, and spit them out quickly, scratching many itches at once.

    The problem is then that I get more questions, but AI can handle them faster than I can muster them up or type them. So it's a net win

    by includenotfound
  • Consider that you can do this as a working day because someone else is plowing the fields that grow your food, probably burning stored energy in fuels for the process

    We're sadly not that efficient. The 150kcal/6h=600kcal/day you've mentioned aren't enough, and it takes more than 600kcal to create 600kcal plus transportation into your home

    Besides, we won't stop existing, so any math about "chatgpt uses X kW and so it's better than hiring another human" doesn't work out. The human doesn't stop burning fuels when not in use: any LLM usage is additional energy that needs to be generated while staying within CO2 budgets

    by Aachen
  • My partner just got a rowing machine that offered "watts" as a unit of how hard you're going (like "calories" or "mph") and got me wondering if they made rowing machines that could slowly charge a battery, and how much I'd need to row to power one of them fancy newfangled M5 Max MacBooks answering prompts.

    All that to say, CrankGPT, I am your target demographic and if you don't respond to my request for a demo I'll be cranking my keyboard with bad reviews online. Or cranking a rowing machine that powers an LLM to do it for me. Wait...

    by kowbell
  • A fairly untrained cyclist is usually able to maintain 200W, so yes this is definitely possible
    by smallpipe
  • Soon enough we will see rowing machines rated in max TFLOPS.
    by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql
  • The "Low Tech Magazine" has a guide to building a DIY bike generator https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2022/03/how-to-build-a-pra...

    Unfortunately even with the bike it seems like you really need to find one machine that can be repurposed, a rowing machine seems a bit of a stretch.

    by nic547
  • > got me wondering if they made rowing machines that could slowly charge a battery

    The Concept2 rowing machines can power itself using the power you generate by rowing, so we're partly there.

    by mrweasel