Does music really charge you up? Now music can charge up your gear!
I ran across this little dilly in the Continental Airlines in-flight magazine (hey, I have to do
something during the take-off/landing electronics moratorium
). An outfit called
Inflight Power has developed a little do-hickey to charge up batteries from any audio jack.
Their target application is obviously charging things on airplanes, but the principle should work with anything that has an audio jack: boom-boxes, televisions, even your computer or those cheap clock-radios hotels tend to like to provide.
How does it work? Well in
their words:
Quote:
|
Simply by plugging in the cable to the passenger seat headset jack, the cable converts the audio output into regulated USB power. Our new version adds an optional battery BOOST to increase the power supplied and offer continuous power.
|
So, reading between the lines, this thing takes an audio output signal (which is just low-power AC when you come right down to it) and converts it to USB grade DC to charge up whatever you plug into it.
It does seem a bit pricey, starting at $35 with no adapters (and of
course they have bundles), but not all
that pricey.
I can't find any size specs on it, but it looks like it's a bit bigger than four AA batteries would be.
It caught my attention, partly because it's just such a clever notion, but also because I can see it as a good potential solution to lots of travel-charging needs, particularly when traveling abroad: less need to worry about adapters when anything with an audio jack will do.
What do y'all think? Dandy Do-dad? Or a solution in search of a problem?