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Comment by Encosia | Hacker News Reader

Superficially, that seems like a great idea. I'd be concerned about wear and weight though.

What happens when it's kicked into a pole, a car, a wall, etc? What happens when someone directly kicks the output port? I can't imagine this not being quickly damaged in real use.

Would it weigh more than a regular ball? Seems like it would have to. Worse, the internal movement would probably cause it to "wobble" through the air, at least a bit. Wouldn't kids avoid a ball that played different than regulation?

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Actually the thing I'd be concerned about is that energy extraction isn't free. It means that you kick the ball and you get more "thud" and less "bounce". How much more? I don't know. But unless you're forcing the kids to play with this ball, quite possibly enough to make it much less attractive.

Almost all of the ideas for harvesting human energy or other incidental energy has this problem where people forget about conservation of energy. If you gussy up your road to collect energy from passing automobiles, the fuel economy goes down. If you hack your floor to do the same to passing people, that makes your floor harder to walk on. People don't really output that many watts under any circumstances, the only thing I've seen that is useful is extracting milliwatts for very small electronics like pacemakers or something. These ideas keep winning design competitions but I think we never see them because they don't actually work in the real world with real people. It seems like the same amount of money put into solar panels is very likely to be a far more effective investment.

It does not have to be perfect. The children who are likely to play with this have different standards than rich kids expecting to be professionals. As long as it can take the wear and tear, it's just fine.

second, it's more interesting that's it a portable generator that's 'fun' to energize. I'm not too concerned about car windows in places that actually use kerosene lamps to light their homes.

Using standardized gear doesn't really have much to do with expecting to go pro. It's painfully frustrating to play most any sport or game when the results of your actions aren't consistent.

Couple that frustration with the fact that regulation balls are common and cheaper, and I don't think you'll find these popular at all in practice.

I'd like to be wrong about that; it would be great if it worked out. I just don't think there's much chance of it going anywhere in reality. Any money behind this would be better spent on distributing small solar panels and batteries to serve the same purpose.

No. These people took a cheap ball and a cheap kinetic energy device and combined them into an expensive thing that's bad at being a ball and bad at being an energy source. This sucks.

I don't think its just about soccer... Kids can play with this ball during the day, and use it to charge a phone at night. If its incredibly cheap then they can sell to third world countries or perhaps just teach people to make it.

A regular ball and separate kinetic energy source would be cheaper than this device. And would work better. There's no upside here.

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