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by rootlocus 4022 days ago
How much power can these motors produce? Can they be used for practical purposes, or are they simply a cool experiment?
2 comments

The fact they don't give any hard numbers is a pretty big sign that this is nothing more than a neat toy. Powering LEDs takes very little energy - 1 mA at 2V (2 mW) is enough to make it visible. Making it flash reduces that power again.

The concept of using bacterial spores as a means of producing motion is pretty neat, though it's obviously a long way from being practical. The suggested use case (low power remote floating sensors) seems pretty suitable for solar power, which has the advantage of maturity and no moving parts.

For practical purposes you need to consider energy returned on energy invested not just power flow rates, although power flow rates can be an issue. Less cost and less environmental damage to just use a battery.

A simple optical sensor could sense rotation, and there's probably some weird meteorological situation or chemical plant process meter that would find a rotating optically detected non powered humidity sensor to be useful.

For chemical process plant work something that measures humidity would be super boring because there's a zillion competing technologies, all mostly unpatented by now. The fun would begin with selective uptake of "weird stuff" non-water substances using the same physical design. Maybe you could detect H2S leaks or hydrocarbon leaks or ...