Supercapacitor Contest!
 What can you do with a lot of supercapacitors? This is no idle question. I picked up a bag of 100 on eBay. These are sweet: Cooper PowerStor Series A carbon aerogel capactitors with ultra-low resistance. Specifications: 2.5 V, 1.5 F, with nominal equivalent series resistance of 60 milliohms at 1 kHz. I recently saw these at Digi-Key for $9.60 each. These aren't the wimpy memory backup caps that aren't rated for enough current to drive an LED. These are power caps, meant for high current charge and discharge. Obviously, these are meant for great things. It only leaves one question: What great things should I do with them? To help answer that, I'm holding a contest: Come up with the best use for a pile of supercaps, and you'll get ten of them to play with. |
Here are the details:
Enter by posting a good idea for a supercapacitor project. Your suggestion doesn't have to use all of the caps, or even most of them-- something that uses only one might be a perfectly good suggestion. Enter as often as you like. You can post your entry as a comment here or E-mail your entry. You have until July 31, 2006, midnight PDT. (If you post anonymously, you might want to leave some contact information as well so that I can contact the winner.)
The winner will be judged by the EMSL staff. Points will be awarded for originality, cleverness and geek appeal. The prize for the best entry is a set of ten supercapacitors, sent by mail. You could possibly interpret the prize value to approach $100! If there are enough good entries, five caps each will be sent to the two runners up.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Rechargeable LED throwies!
- Storage element for bike headlight generator.
- Fast recharge radio control battery for electric model planes, to enable mid-air refueling!
[Update: Contest has ended. The winners were announced here]
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