The Supercapacitor Contest ends at midnight on Monday night, July 31. The end is near! This is not eBay; there is no advantage in waiting until the last minute. It’s your last chance to submit an entry and possibly win fame and/or fortune, in the form of ten sweet supercapacitors. To recap: submit your best idea for what to do with a bunch of 2.5 V, 1.5 F carbon aerogel capacitors with ultra low equivalent series resistance. To enter, leave your entry as a comment here or E-mail it to us. Keep reading to see some of the cool ideas that we’ve already received. Can you do better?
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: The End Is Near. →

Besides the eight project ideas that have been listed as comments to the original contest announcement, I’ve received 39 pieces of contest-entry E-mail, some of which contain more than one project idea.
I’m counting each entry that I’ve received as a separate entry. One piece of email contains a list of thirteen (but number 13 reads “i couldn’t think of anything else, i just like the number thirteen”).

Some of these ideas are just great! Keep ’em coming!

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.
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest! →