Listen, we all love Sungwoo Park here, don’t deny it. There’s been more than one satisfied reader here on Yanko when it comes to Sungwoo. But this time, the reader took an extra step and became an inspired advocate for action. This reader cum designer, Jerome Demers, took the Sungwoo Energy Seed concept and made it DIY and desktop sized. Don’t you want to play along with the “dead” batteries too?

The parts used to make this contraption are intuitive: metal plates, plastic to hold the batteries in place, margarine container for the base, but here’s the important part; the circuit ingredients:

Parts you will need:

1 meter of white and 1 meter of black wirewrap wire 30 or 28 gauge

1 x Ferrite bead digikey part number 240-2145-ND

40 x High power LED

1x 1K resistor

1x 2N3904 or 2N2222 NPN transistor

These are put together to make what’s called a Joule Thief. This is a fun and amazing little amalgamation that makes use of left-over juice in batteries that you’d otherwise throw away because they’ve got little-to-seemingly-no power left. They almost always have a bit of juice that you can access using the right formula. Hood a thief up to an LED light, and WHAMO! You’ve got a nice little environment helper.

Check below and at at Demers’ Instructables entry for further details and instructions. Watch the movie for words from Demers himself.

The most important part of this story is, of course, that he was inspired by a Yanko entry. Yanko! Yes, Yanko, bringing the conceptual industrial design world together, one post at a time.

Thank you very much Jerom Demers! Well played!

Designer: Jerome Demers