Out in the wild? Need to charge your phone? A new startup has come up with a gadget called FlameStower that lets you harness the heat from a campfire, gas stove or a naked flame to add some battery life to a phone or a USB-charged device. The inventors, hailing from Stanford’s StartX Summer 2013 class, have now launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to get its “charger” out in the market. This is not the first time this project has reached out for crowdfunding, though. Last year, FlameStower made an appearence on Indiegogo with a goal of $30,000. At the time, the startup was only able to raise $4,625. The gadget comes with a maximum power output of 3W and an average output of 2W. This, according to its inventors, will be enough to give around 2 to 4 minutes of phone talk-time for every minute of charge. Take a look at how the gizmo works below:
The target groups for the team behind FlameStower are those who throng the outdoors. But the team is also positioning their device as a reliable back-up option to keep in case of a power outage or a natural disaster. Keeping the kind of gear you take to the outdoors in mind, the startup has designed the gadget to come with a fairly flat profile so that campers can easily slide it into their backpacks. The advantage of this back-up charger is that it is not dependent on the sun, like solar-powered charges. The downside, though, is that you can only use this device if you have easy access to a naked flame or fire. How does the device work, you ask? FlameStower creates and harnesses a temperature differential to generate electricity with its Thermoelectric Generator. The user basically needs to expose its metal blade to a flame to heat it up, while the other side is cooled by a small water reservoir that they have filled with water. The hotter the fire you expose the metal side to, the more charge gets generated. While the electricity output will definitely not match the charge you will get from a wall outlet, FlameStower’s makers say that it will be similar to the charge you get from a laptop's USB port. The startup is hoping to raise $15,000 on Kickstarter to get the charger into the market. And the campaign is already half way to its goal, with 28 days still left for the project to get over. The project, this time around, seems to be garnering more responses than before. Early backers of the device are being offered FlameStower for a price of $70 (Rs 4340 approx), which is $10 lesser than its expected retail price. The startup, if all goes well, hopes to start shipping the alternative chargers from December.
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