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Comment by jpeterson | Hacker News Reader

The basic idea here is actually a very old approach -- clocks have been powered this way for centuries. But it's very cool and refreshing to see a modern electrical spin on it.

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Might be fun to make an electric clock that uses gravity, go full circle.

Rotor systems like in some automatic watches produce very little energy. Even at 100% efficiency it wouldn't be able to sustain an electronic circuit.

Edit: I was wrong. See below.

My automatic watch contains an electronic circuit, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Interesting. What is the circuit for ?

Are you sure it's not powered by a standard watch battery ?

Yes, it is a quartz movement with a capacitor that is charged by a mechanism similar to a mechanical auto-winding watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch#Automatic_quar...

Seiko Kinetic watches are quartz watches that are powered by movement. That's 30 year old technology.

I stand corrected

Not only is that not what I was thinking of, which was more akin to a grandfather clock, but I don't believe that at all. Just using piezoelectric vibration sensors I was able to charge a cap to light up an LED- a rotor mechanism would generate much, much more power, and consider today's energy efficient ICs I see know reason why it wouldn't work.

It would be great if the gravity system was bidirectional, so that you could just flip it upside down instead of lifting the weight each time.

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