DIY Generator Shoes Turn Footsteps Into Electricity
Annoyed that walking doesn’t do anything useful for you? Then you’ll want to check out these generator shoes that produce electricity.
Bipedal locomotion is extremely efficient, which why our ancestors were able to develop successful persistence hunting strategies that let them catch animals by simply maintaining the chase until those animals collapsed from exhaustion. But it can still feel like walking requires an awful lot of effort that mostly goes to waste. What if you could turn your walk to the bus stop into an extra minute or two of doomscrolling on TikTok? Jeevan made that possible with these DIY generator shoes that convert footsteps into electricity.
Piezoelectricity is current produced through the mechanical stress of certain materials, such as quartz. That usually generates very little power, so the most common use for the piezoelectric effect is in sensors. Acoustic-electric guitars, for example, often have piezoelectric pickups that convert vibrations in the wood into a weak audio signal for amplification. But it is possible to generate a usable amount of power with a piezoelectric element and enough force — so long as your definition of “usable” is generous. Jeevan’s shoes do exactly that, charging up an 18650 lithium battery that can be put to work later.
These shoes use the stress created by the force of the user’s footsteps to produce power in small piezoelectric plates. Jeevan’s design puts six of those plates on the bottom of the shoe, sandwiched between the original insole and a secondary DIY insole. When the user takes a step, the piezoelectric plates get smashed, bent, and jostled, which produces electricity. Jeevan says that it generates about 7V, but doesn’t specify the current and so we can’t judge the total power output.
A diode bridge converts AC from the piezoelectric plates to DC in order to feed the power to a charging module (it appears to be a generic TP4056-based board) that tops off the 18650 battery that sits in a holder on the side of the shoe. Eventually, that battery can go into a device to make use of the generated power.
Because we don’t know how much power is being produced (it can’t be much), it is hard to say how useful this is. But regardless, it could be a fun project for those interested in passive energy harvesting.