Kicking The Infrastructure Habit

Last weekend I delivered the inaugural Jim Bettison Memorial Oration at the biannual Adelaide Festival of Ideas. This was a great honour, and my presentation was well received by the audience, as was evidenced by the poignancy of their questions.

Here is the abstract of my oration:

Modern communications systems use extensive and expensive infrastructure to deliver services we could only dream of a few decades ago. This works for those who enjoy peace and sufficient wealth, but fails to reach the last billion people in poorer countries, as well as those in remote, emergency or disaster situations. Now modern mobile phones have the potential to communicate directly, to form networks without reliance on any infrastructure. The Serval Project based at Flinders University is turning this dream into a reality. It is working to make communications available to everyone, anywhere, any time especially to those who need it most.

You can listen to the oration by downloading the MP3 from the Radio Adelaide website.

You can also listen to an ABC Bush Telegraph interview about the oration that I recorded a few days prior to the oration.

A Thermo-Electric Saucepan?

(Please take a look at our crowd-funding campaign at igg.me/at/speakfreely.)

Today we received our thermo-electric saucepan from TES New Energy. You can see some pictures of it below.

This amazing device provides a full-powered USB port when placed on a fire by using thermo-electric generation.

The interesting innovation is that by incorporating the thermo-couples into a saucepan the water in the pot keeps one side of the junction cool to maximise the power output, while ensuring that the about 98% of heat that the thermo-couple cannot turn into electricity heats your water.

This also means that they can use different types of thermo-couples that work better at different temperatures.  The hot-side of the pan uses lower-efficiency thermo-couples that can tolerate the higher temperatures, and the "cold" side of that is joined to the hot side of the lower-temperature thermo-couple which is also a little more efficient, and the water in the pan helps to make sure that this lower-temperature thermo-couple does not over heat.  Together, they  avoid the complications that would normally be present if using only one of the thermo-couples, either lower yield, or the potential to be damaged by higher-temperature fires.

The saucepan approach is also an elegant way to circumvent the atrocious inefficiency that typically plagues thermo-electric generators, since in a diaster or remote location you probably need hot water, anyway, a realisation that TES NewEnergy had following the mega earthquake that struck Japan recently.

So this saucepan is about enough to charge a phone if you are in the middle of nowhere, and solar isn't an option for whatever reason -- perhaps because the power is out due to storm, volcano, or just during bad weather.

Anyway, we are looking forward to some fun testing Serval mesh phones powered by a high-tech saucepan on a campfire.