Publicity
The concept was picked up by the editor of hackaday.com who wrote an article on the project. As hackaday.com writes about often advanced technology re-configured or built into something new by private persons, they have become a primary news source for numerous other blog/news sites. From here the concept spread like wildfire. inhabitat.com, threehugger.com, ohgizmo.com, cnet.com, Boing Boing, wired.com, gizmodo.com and engadet.com were amongst the larger to write about the concept.
Numbers
In the moment of writing are there 7520 hits on google and 172 blogs that link back to my original post. But the most interesting result of this hype was all the discussion generated over these sites, my blog and flickr. It was most encouraging and lead directly to the format of the result.
Comments
The most interesting part is that no one that I have discovered says the concept is fake. A few points out that it would not work due to some technical details, and they might be right, but even they did not dismiss the idea. In fact did several commentators suggest improvements and work a rounds to make it function.
Here are some:
The helpful:
Goondoks/Gizmodo: You really only need the the PV on half the battery, unless you use mirrors. The windows in my house don’t track the sun all to well. Maybe you could charge them by setting them up like sun dials[1].
The Smart:
Carlhage/Cnet:A flexible cell might be 50W/m2 or 5mw/cm2 in full sun. An AA battery is about 3mWh, and
there will be a small area, maybe 3cm2, but reflection at shallow angles might reduce this to 1 or 2 cm2. Also, it won’t be at the maximum power point, so 1/2 the power is lost. It might need 1000 hours of full-sun to charge– probably longer than the self-discharge rate[2].
The not so helpful, but funny:
abeagle/hackaday: get your self some radioactive waste, mix it up into a paste. Then smear the radioactive goo all over the face of the solar cell. Finally roll up the solar cell into the size of your desired battery. Viola, This will work during cloudy days too[3].
Finally there was a request to buy volumes of these batteries to Haiti and a request came from a Japanese television show to have them featured on TV. But that will be for another day.
The concept is also presented as the DIY project of one of my personas in the blog untappedenergy.org.
References in this post