Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: tickmike on May 01, 2008, 01:57:40 PM
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7377063.stm
Gives details of a very useful electronics item that will make a massive difference for the future of electronics.
Any good to replace my One brain cell I have left. :'(
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Interesting. I'm not sure about replacing brain cells though. :)
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Gosh - technology amazes me sometimes.
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Gosh - technology amazes me sometimes.
Yes it is amazing, I remember my father making Radio's ,TV's and amplifiers with 'Valves' that would light up the living room (I still have a box full of different valves 807's, ECC83 are just two of many).
Then my father started my interest in electronics with a 'cat whisker' crystal set, then I started making my own 'germanium' transistor radio's etc., Then out came integrated circuits and things were getting smaller and smaller.
Interesting. I'm not sure about replacing brain cells though. :)
I said to my daughter the other day when she was doing her revising for her sats, I said in her life time there would be some small electronic memory chip implanted into the human body to help you remember and you could update it like we do with our computers today.
No not one of my predictions again. ::)
I wished I followed up the one I remembered writing about when I was at junior school, because I was building my own radios, I put in an essay about one day you would be able to buy "Wind Up Radio's"
I should have taken a Patent out on it. :'(
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Heh - the 'wind-up' radio concept always brings a smile to my face, coz of when it hit the headlines on TV in a documentary / news bulletin that showed how he had managed to bring radio to loads of people in a poor developing country where people couldn't afford electricity etc, so they couldn't obviously power a normal radio!
I think it was around the time when I was quite young, perhaps too young to fully appreciate what the inventor was actually achieving, both technically and what he was doing with the radio. I guess I understood enough to see it as a good thing, so I remember it fondly!
/me now has an image of loads of people in their mud huts listening to Chris Moyles in the morning going .. wtf is he on about??!! - actually though, that's what most of Radio 1's audience do anyway in the mornings - the guy's bonkers!! :lol:
Ahem, that careered off-topic a bit.. sorry :-[
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1995 was when Bayliss started manufacturing in South Africa. The real trick to the radio was that it genuinely didn't require batteries. This might seem "obvious" to most people but its not as most of these "wind-up" torches/radios etc simply charge a set of batteries which WILL require replacement and disposal. Bayliss' original design for the power source was entirely mechanical - wind it up and it played for an hour or so.
Sadly the Freeplay radio is no longer manufactured. There are however plenty of designs which charge batteries which entirely misses the point of the original design. The original design didn't make big business $$$$ though so that's why its now no longer manufactured. Still as long as the fatcats get their lucre who cares if the poor have to pay more eh? Sorry - veering OT there :lol: