If you’re into keeping fit and are an environmentalist looking to reduce your impact on the earth without giving up your home comforts – such as your portable media player or your cellphone – then perhaps you should check out Kyung Guk Lee’s E Rope skipping-rope charger.
Featured over on Yanko Design, the concept device is simple at heart: appearing like a futuristic skipping rope – which, frankly, is precisely what it is. If you skip at a fast enough rate, you burn energy – which helps you lose weight and keep fit – just like any other rope, but rather than all that energy to waste, the E Rope captures a portion of it and stores it in AA-sized rechargeable batteries stored in the handles.
Each handle contains a pair of batteries housed in a hard casing protected with a non-slip silicone cover. A color-changing LED switches from red to blue to indicate when the battery is fully charged and ready for use – which the designer believes would take about twenty minutes of skipping in order to completely charge all four batteries from empty.
While this isn’t perhaps the easiest green gadget to work into your lifestyle – for those who cycle that distinction goes to Nokia’s Bicycle Charge Kit, while those who walk everywhere might find the Power Wellies from Orange and GotWind more useful – it’s a very neat concept, and if you find skipping an easy way to keep fit then it’ll give you an easy way to keep your portable devices running for longer – at least, those that are powered by AA-sized batteries.
Sadly – and in keeping with a disappointingly large number of the more impressive green charging gadgets that we’re seeing these days – the E Rope remains, for now, merely a design concept, with no plans announced thus far for mass production of the device.
Green is certainly the new black: as well as the E Rope and other above-mentioned charging systems, we’ve recently seen designers try to harness the power of play to charge portable devices via the Magic Charger and companies even looking to turn the windows on our houses into power generation systems via transparent solar panels. One thing is for certain: if you’re looking for funding in today’s technology markets, you could do a lot worse than figure out a green power technology.
