Can You Charge A Phone with Marbles

imagine you can capture the energy of these falling balls and create electricity well I built this entire machine complete with a conveyor lift over engineered funnels and a custom Paddle Wheel energy Harvester all to see if I could charge my phone with falling marbles answering this question required almost 2 months of engineering with some unexpected problems and some interesting Solutions and while this will probably be the least efficient energy storage system ever invented it will definitely be the most fun let's start with the basics energy from renewable sources like solar and wind is generated when

the resources are available more often than not this doesn't line up with when the energy is most needed so you could let that unused energy go to waste or better yet find a way to store it and you might be wondering why not just use a battery to store the energy batteries work but it would be really hard to scale that to a level that would be able to handle the needs of the power grid also probably better to save our lithium resources for things that need to be portable like cars and electronics there's already a lot of non-battery energy storage systems in the works like

flywheel systems molten salt systems there's even a big crane that lifts and lowers weights to store energy but by far the most popular systems in use right now are called pumped Hydro systems basically Excess power is used to pump water to the top of a reservoir storing the generated electrical energy in the form of gravitational potential energy when there's Demand on the grid the water can later be released back down to the bottom through a turbine converting it back into electricity so really I'm just going to be building a pumped Hydro System but instead of using water I'm going to be using

balls lots of them and I'm going to call this thing a Sphero electric battery pretty cool I know but how much power can you get from a single marble well the steel ball weighs 8 G the higher you hold it the more energy it potentially has that can be converted into electricity this potential energy can be determined by the equation mg where m is the mass of the ball 8 G or 0.008 kg G is the acceleration due to

gravity which is 9.81 m/s squared and H is the height from which the ball can drop so at 1 Meer of drop this ball has a potential energy of a whopping 0.784 jewles for context to charge a phone we need a minimum of 5 Watts which is 5 Jew per second so in a perfect world we would need to drop about 64 marbles per second from 1 meter to get anywhere close to charging a phone 64 marbles per second sounds pretty challenging but realistically I learned best by doing so I'm going to disregard all of this math and I'm just going to start stuff and I'm probably going to

regret it later sorry future J let's do it to get the ball rolling I decided to begin the whole process by creating a very basic generator electricity is generated when a magnet passes by a wire this is just a physical law which was discovered back in 1831 by my boy Mikey Faraday the more wires it passes the more electricity it makes so you could coil a bunch of wire around a spool pass a magnet by it and generate some electricity I could combine a bunch of these coils together to create a generator Tom Stanton made a video about it it and it worked really well or I

could use an already optimized set of coils which I have in abundance here in my shop and if you're thinking that just looks like a stepper motor you're right it is all electric motors are technically generators when run in Reverse when I connect the motor to this belt and pulley to speed up the output a bit and rotate the crank you can see that it spits out a voltage but there is one problem here the voltage is alternating current which you can tell by the sine wave on the oscilloscope to use this generator to do something useful like charge a phone for example I first need to rectify this problem come on that was a solid electrical

engineering joke because this circuit is called a full Bridge rectifier get it whatever when I connect it to the output of the generator you can see that the output voltage becomes a straight line which is DC which technically means it should be able to charge a phone I plugged the phone into this voltage converter and connected it to the output of the rectifier and now when I crank the handle yes we can actually charge a phone so really we just need to get this crank to turn using Marbles and we're laughing I know that I went through this series stuff really quick so I recommend

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my future projects so if you'd like to try out brilliant for free for a month you can check out brilliant.org engy scan this QR code or click the link in the description below that'll also get you 20% off your first year if you decide to join thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video and honestly just like making me smarter and with that let's go put some of the stuff we learned into practice and generate some electricity with balls getting marbles to spin the generator is so simple

in theory attach a Paddle Wheel to the motor shaft create a track to direct the balls into the paddle wheel and now when we fill up the track and release the balls boom we got power but even after increasing the ball capacity and gearing up the motor with pulley to increase the resistance on the paddle wheel you can see that it doesn't last very long and this is where simple in theory becomes surprisingly challenging in reality because if we just try to dump balls out of a bucket through a funnel right into the generator sort of like this the balls will always always get stuck literally a problem with every every single marble project so we need a way

to feed a single stream of balls into the generator my first idea is to create a super long snake run on a flat sheet of material then I can stock a bunch of them to get a single stream I made this quick prototype and yeah it you can see that it completely sucks if you want to get a consistent roll you need to increase the angles if you increase the angles the snake run length per sheet gets shorter which means the amount of snake run stocks increases I'm working in this cramp basement so feels like it might be a

little bit unfeasible to try to manufacture these massive Stacks with the limited resources and space that I have here let's find a better way this little proof of concept May hold the key here are two single streams of balls this mechanism makes it so the first stream has to empty fully before this lever drops letting the gate drop allowing the second stream to empty I've refined the mechanism a bit I've added a third stream but there is a little problem here you can see that it works quite well when it's filled up this much but as you add more and more balls the weight piles up pushing harder on this

lever and eventually the force on the lever is high enough that the final ball doesn't get through this means the lever can't drop which means that the whole thing fails one way to solve this is to apply some basic physics and make the lever longer which reduces the force pushing down on the ball and you can see that this actually works let's go but it's not a perfect solution because each gate has to be pushed in from the previous gate so the longer the lever the more the gate has to be pushed in and this becomes a pretty significant amount by even the 10th gate reducing the number of the balls that the system can handle thus requiring more stop and that's leaving us exactly where we

started I think there's a better way using the same general concept I shifted the levers to inside each run the levers normally sit in this position pulled up by these elastics but the weight of the marbles pushes the lever down which blocks the tab connected to the gate preventing it from opening once the first stream of marbles is released the lever pops up it frees the next gate and lets the next run of marbles out and as you can see when the entire thing is filled up it comfortably dumps all three streams if I make this stream longer pushing harder on the

gate it gets stuck so anticlimactic come on but if I add another elastic go let's go that's sick okay time to scale this thing up but before I do I decided I should probably think a bit more about how the balls are going to exit because remember the whole funnel thing yeah it gets stuck so instead I made this test piece and as you can see

each arm branches into a vertical branch which will be the vertical branch that goes directly into the generator this works well at this small scale but when there are thousands of balls running through the system it's inevitable that it's going to jam like this engineering is all about finding solutions that make all the work you did last week completely Obsolete and I realized while trying to solve this that I was over-engineering everything I wanted to see if a more basic binary funnel will work here's my first attempt which I kind of relied on my intuition to design and I sort of stumbled onto something quite interesting because of the the Steep angles here the balls sort of

zipper into place like the world's most perfect Highway Merch this bottom angle is slightly shallower so you can see that the balls get stuck here but if we correct that and feed it with an entire stream of balls will it still work yes sir what if we increase this to eight stages does it still flow yes it does so it looks like all that work I did on the gate mechanism is actually completely unnecessary passive final for the win I'm also curious if the entrance lanes are necessary so cooked them out and you can see that the

balls just you guessed it jamm so lanes are in fact necessary for the final prototype I'm thinking that I'm going to have 16 Lanes of balls all funnel into the one but this presents yet another problem that I hadn't previously thought about how do we get the balls coming off the conveyor belt to consistently filter into each lane if only there was an elegant solution for dividing a single stream of marbles into multiple streams maybe even the Holy Grail of solutions thank you ventgarden quite recently he challenged his audience to come up with the ultimate marble divider and not only

did they deliver but they delivered the Holy Grail of marble dividers wintergarten explains his solution in detail which allowed me to quickly design my own Holy Grail marble dividers for my specific marble diameter to fully understand why this is the Holy Grail let's try my finnal design in Reverse it sort of works but once a branch fills up completely if the top ball is too high it blocks the entrance to the next branch on the other hand the Holy Grail divider uses this zigzag pattern which is spaced out to exactly the ball's diameter this geometry makes it so that

the top ball is always in this exact position never blocking the other Branch as the whole Branch moves down the balls travel through the zigzags in this pattern until a critical position is reached where the entire stack drops the distance of a single marble this means that regardless of what's Happening Downstream a lane will never get blocked winter gon does a really good job of explaining this in his video which is 100% worth checking out I've linked it below but I think now with this final puzzle piece solved it's time to full send and build the entire machine and see if we can generate electricity let's

do it [Music]

okay the build is done so we're going to fill it up with these tiny gravitational granules I'm trying to avoid saying the word balls and see if we can generate some [Applause] electricity oh there's a lot more where that came from

Moment of Truth this thing is plugged in so I'm going to turn it on and see if we can even lift balls up to the top because there's a lot of weight pressing on this but I got faith let's go oh yeah it's no problem at all should we go faster [Applause]

it's actually working [Applause] [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] okay can't believe how well that worked for the first try so here's the second Moment of Truth can we generate any electricity so we got this light strip right here plugged in through the rectifiers into the motor when I pull this Rod the generator is going to start three

two one go remember when I said that I was going to regret disregarding the math to just start building things well that time has now arrived my intuition which was entirely wrong was telling me that a single stream of balls running through the generator would be enough to at least turn on this LED strip for reference it requires less than 0.5 Watts which is way less than a phone but there are two problems here the more obvious one is you can see that the paddle wheel is turning faster than the

balls are dropping this means that the generator isn't taking advantage of the full weight of the column of balls just the balls that are sitting on the Paddle Wheel at any instant when I remove the belt entirely the problem is Amplified because there's no resistance anymore but when I drag my finger on the pulley the added resistance allows the full weight of the balls to transfer to the Paddle Wheel optimizing the power output of the system and swapping in this bigger pulley should have the same effect but this doesn't solve the second bigger problem when I pull the tab you can see that the generator is now moving

way too slowly and when I measure the voltage coming through the output you can see it's quite low this makes sense because even though it's now more optimized for the current configuration I haven't made the generator any more powerful the only way to do that is either increase the max height of the generator or increase the number of columns and paddle Wheels I've decided to increase the weight pushing on the Paddle Wheel by adding a second Paddle Wheel and column connected to the same shaft as the original one once again simple in theory but in practice it means I have to spend two full days disassembling the machine modifying Parts in CAD printing out the new parts

and reassembling the Machine ensuring that the additional padd wheel perfectly aligns with the original done man engineering can be so hard sometimes and actually this just came in the mail this is a new logo I designed for specifically this kind of thing it's a gear it's got two cross eyes for like that perpetually tired always overwhelmed engineer and then you can see like the smile is like a wavy smile because like you're smiling but this actually really really sucks in the moment but it's worth it because in the end when you make something that works

it like it's a real smile all that being said this isn't even done yet because we don't know if it's going to work so let's put all the balls back into the machine try to generate electricity once again let's do it I added a couple other probably unnecessary improvements of the machine like this exit ramp extension to increase the overall capacity of the machine this wall catcher ramp thing to stop balls from falling off at the top this belt tensioner to reduce some of the wobble of the conveyor and most importantly these lightning so you know that this thing is dangerous so there

are three things that I want to know test number one can it power this LED strip ready [Applause] [Applause] go oh my God I'm so relieved that that worked project is not dead yet test number two is the power coming out

of the generator enough to lift marbles up let's [Applause] go the answer is not even a little bit but it's interesting to note that that actually puts a lot more resistance on the generator all right what about a single Marvel ready [Applause] go so the answer is no we can't even lift a single marble but to be fair it's

a really big motor I didn't think it was going to work out anyways and that's not the reason we're here phone's plugged in connected to the machine all right the real Moment of Truth in three two one go

so I mean it can charge a phone it just could can only really charge a phone for like 30 seconds before we have to recharge the battery and then charge the phone again it's kind of crazy when you think about it this right here can probably charge a phone four times fully this whole machine right here can only charge a phone for 30 seconds the power density in this thing right here is unbelievable I hope you learned something I definitely learned something along the way way and obviously had a

ton of fun while doing it thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video