Charge Your Cell Phone With a Soccer Ball

I don’t know much about green technology, but I know what I like. So when I heard about the sOccket – a soccer ball that stores the energy generated through playing the beautiful game – I wanted to know more.

The sOccket is the brainchild of four ladies at Harvard University. They saw that in certain developing countries, communities were using kerosene lamps for light. The fumes from kerosene lamps don’t do anyone’s health any favours, and they are also big CO2 producers. In short, they’re not good. But if you live somewhere that’s not connected to an electricity grid, then you don’t have a lot of choice. The Harvard ladies are aiming to change that with the sOccket.

It’s a regular shaped football, but with an “inductive coil mechanism” inside. Don’t worry, I didn’t know what an “inductive coil mechanism” was either, but according to Inhabitat it means there’s a magnet inside that’s drawn through a coil when the ball moves around, and the resulting kinetic energy is then stored in a battery. Once the game of football is over, the energy in the battery can then be used to power an LED lamp, as a replacement for the kerosene lamp.

So, the basic idea is that kids in developing communities can play football all day with a sOccket ball, and then that same ball can be used to power LED lamps at night. The sOccket has been trialled in South Africa and Kenya, and early results suggest that 15 minutes of football is enough to power an LED lamp for three hours. My favourite thing here is that this should eventually be available as both a community tool in developing countries and also as a geek chic gadget in wealthier nations, where it could be used for charging cellphones and such.

Using a “buy one-give one” model, the sOccket team hopes to sell the ball in Western markets, as a high-end tech gadget, then use the profits to distribute the balls at little or no cost in poor countries through development organizations like Whizz Kids United. Their goal is to have a completed version of sOccket that can be distributed by the end of 2010.

I’m not usually big on gadgets, but this is something I could get excited about. Imagine charging your iPhone (or whatever you may have) using the energy you created by dribbling or hitting a free kick that day? Imagine how much energy Didier Drogba would have created this weekend when he smashed his free kick against the crossbar? Maybe when the oil runs out we’ll be able meet 100% of the world’s energy demands through Didier Drogba striking sOcckets.

More information at the sOccket website.

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Category: World Football