Author Topic: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects  (Read 385258 times)

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Offline miguelvp

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« Last Edit: February 04, 2016, 10:32:14 am by miguelvp »
 

Offline nwvlab

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #377 on: February 06, 2016, 08:52:22 pm »
Looks to me like it taps into energy that would otherwise be wasted. In effect it makes the 100W lamp a tiny bit more efficient since a tiny bit more light is usable.

Sorry but I disagree.

He is not suggesting to use something like a "solar wall" or a "carpet". In this way you would really use energy that would be otherwise wasted (still you must consider the energy payback time, which would be infinite, because to manufacture those devices you will need far more energy than you will possibly achieve during that device - and ours!- lifetime!). He is suggesting something much like surrounding a lamp with solar panels. You are therefore using a considerable amount of light (which would be instead use d to illuminate your room) to generate (with a very low efficiency, 30% with a monocrystalline silicon solar cell. Much worse in case of low level illumination) energy to light some LEDs. THerefore you're not using energy that would be otherwise wasted! You're wasting energy (tens of Watts!) to achieve something like 100mW, which you could draw directly from the mains with "100%" efficiency... There is no energy saving  at all (which is instead advertised in the description)! A much better idea would be, instead, using a LED based lamp (instead of the 100W incadescent light) and power instead your LED Christmas lights from the mains!

Cheers
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #378 on: February 07, 2016, 10:48:52 am »
Quote
because to manufacture those devices you will need far more energy than

Completely spurious argument. The energy that did go into making the kit would have been wasted had the kit not been made anyway - none of it would or could have gone into lighting the pretty baubles. The only argument you could legitimately make along those lines is that the money spent on buying this could go towards a wallwart to power the baubles directly.

Even then, it's a spurious argument. Sometimes we seem to pay far more than is returned because of convenience. Or art. Or because we think whatever it is is cool. All you can say is that whoever buys this thinks the money spent on it is worth it to them.

Quote
You are therefore using a considerable amount of light (which would be instead use d to illuminate your room)

Another spurious argument, I'm afraid. The way I see this is that the pickups are inside the lampshade and the light thus collected would otherwise go into heating the shade a miniscule amount. It would make little difference to the room since the light wouldn't be going directly into the room anyway. Even if you suggest it would bounce off the shade, think about what fraction of the lamp output that would be, and then spread the loss of it over the entire room. No-one would noticed. Instead, that otherwise unnoticed light gets focused onto pinpoints in the baubles that you do notice. Surely you can see that looking at an LED is far more noticeable than trying to see the difference that LED would make to an already illuminated room!
 

Offline nwvlab

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #379 on: February 10, 2016, 02:42:52 pm »
The energy that did go into making the kit would have been wasted had the kit not been made anyway

Under which assumptions are you saying that “the energy to make the device would have been wasted in any case?”

Yes, if you don’t make the Zero device, you will waste some hundreds of mW of optical power, but you (the world) will save much more energy because you actually are not going to make that device! (In particular you won’t need the solar panels for it).
Therefore it’s totally untrue that the energy required to manufacture Zero would have been wasted in any case! Because if you decide to buy some conventional mains-powered LED lamps, you will still consume (considering the whole device life time) much less energy than that required to manufacture Zero, in particular, its solar panels.

You might argue: “yes, but in this way you won’t light up THAT particular pretty lights”. Of course, but you can still buy similar mains-powered LED lamps!
And the main aims of that project are not those “pretty lights” but:
1) To make an eco-sustainable device, which saves energy (not just yours. He is talking about world’s energy consumption due to Christmas lights. Hence you use that device to light your tree, you must include the energy that the manufacturer spent to produce it).
2) To reduce lighting costs.

And the campaign says: (I’m quoting word-by-word what the author wrote in the project page)
1) “Illuminate Without Consuming Energy”.
2) “Humanity has the opportunity to make sustainable development [...] .”
3) “Energy equivalent to 6 bilions euro! That is what the planet consumes just on Christmas lights in December.”
4) “Hence no electricity consumption”.

Well let’s reply to those claims:
1) No, you ARE consuming energy! Because if 1000 guys buy that device, the factory WILL have to build those 1000. And because the typical energy payback of a silicon solar cell (under optimal SUNLIGHT exposure) is SOME YEARS, it follows that who knows how many Christmases you will need to get back the energy that was invested in making your “Zero”. Considering also that the device might stop working well before you arrive at the energy payback time.
2) Yes, the humanity has the opportunity to make sustainable development. By NOT buying that Zero (see 1), and, possibly, using mains-powered LED lamps instead of incandescent ones, which are still widespread.
3) The reported number has no sense at all, for the following reasons:
a) They are considering also public Christmas illumination (which is on almost only during night time! Therefore solar panels can’t be used, at least without some accumulators).
b) They are also considering the still present incandescent lights, which could be much more easily replaced by LED lamps, instead of thinking of recycling the light...
4) Yes, technically no electricity (in your bill) consumption. However there will be still energy consumption, if you take into account the manufacturer (and this plays against eco-sustainability). This energy is not likely to be compensated by the “zero energy” illumination.

Beside, a side effect of that gadget is that you need to keep on that 100-W desk lamp to light up less than 1W Christmas tree! (for instance I typically do not turn on a desk light if I don’t use, while I always keep on my Christmas lights in Christmas time). So is this power saving?

Other things that really stink:
1) There is no real picture at all, showing the device working. No video, no nothing. Just rendering. (I guess Kickstarter rejected its application, as they typically require a picture of a working prototype...).
2) The solar panels seem too small. Can they provide enough power?  Let’s do the some ballpark calculations. Assuming a VERY GENEROUS 5% incandescent lamp efficiency, assuming a VERY GENEROUS 30% cell efficiency (as if the cells were better than top-quality monocrystalline silicon under 1-Sun constant exposure. And 30% is very close to the theoretical maximum for a single junction silicon cell), and assuming 100-W desktop lamp (indeed, what we need here is the optical power – i.e. efficiency*consumption – so you might also use a much more energy efficient lamp, with smaller power. Still it must emit light also on the sides, limiting the choices), you’ll get 1.5 W MAXIMUM (if the cells were arranged so that they gather all the incoming light. That is, the desk lamp is ) electric power. Still, you will not be able to get 100% of the light, but let’s say (see latter part of this post) a very generous 70%, i.e. 1W. Assume also a 100% DC-DC converter efficiency, so 1W might seem adequate for 48 LEDs (maybe they are arranged so that only 24 or 12 are on at the same time).
Still, as you could evaluate from the project image (that one which shows the Zero installed in the yellow desk lamp), you are getting only something like 25% of the light (and here I’m over calculating. As you can see I tried to draw some lines with similar length to estimate what is the coverage). Therefore, you haven’t 1W, but only 250mW. That is too close to the minimum, there is no margin (and too much generosity in my assumptions)! 250mW are barely enough to light up 12 20mW LEDs... And who uses a 100-W (or 10-W equivalent filament-led lamp, which has a similar 1200 lumen output?) in a desk lamp?!?

In conclusion: this project is definitely similar to the infamous Batteriser, and it is worthy to stay in this thread: they both promise a lot, which, under wrong assumptions (100% efficiency of the batteriser, and the fact that battery powered devices stop working at 1.3 V), could be achieved, at least in principle.  However, in the real life they are likely to give you only a very limited gain (much less than that advertized) or even possibly they can worsen the problem.

As a last remark, I have now performed some measurements using a desk lamp and an integration sphere (see pictures below. The setup is not optimized for this lamp, so you must only take the results only as a ballpark starting point). I have to admit that you were partially right about the amount of light that can be reflected by the lampshade, even if I used much larger “fake” solar cells (those blue cardboards), and a much smaller desk lamp. With this configuration, in fact, you lose only 55 lumens out of the 199 that came out of that 60-W lamp (that lamp, alone, mounted on an Edison 27 socket, yielded about 640 lm – a bit lower than I expected, but I think because it was quite aged). Therefore the lampshade blocks a generous 69% of light (and that is the light that you can use for “Zero”. Still not enough, I’m afraid).


Offline PlainName

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #380 on: February 11, 2016, 11:19:19 am »
I applaud your running actual experiments to get real figures  :-+

However, I still think you are missing some important aspects. For instance:

Quote
Beside, a side effect of that gadget is that you need to keep on that 100-W desk lamp to light up less than 1W Christmas tree!

That's one way of looking at it. But the way I was looking at it is that the tree lights simply follow the desk lamp. If the desk lamp is off the tree is too, vice versa. So,  no, I wouldn't dream of turning on the desk lamp in order to have the tree lights on. But it would be  neat to have the tree lights whenever the desk lamp is on with no effort required. I mean, you don't turn on your phone constantly to view the animated wall paper. But when you want to use the phone and turn it on... wow! look at the animated wallpaper!
 

Online McBryce

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #381 on: February 11, 2016, 01:23:09 pm »
Or how about just using standard LED lights on the Christmas tree and swap the 100W bulb in the desk lamp for a 60W bulb. That way you'd save even more and eliminate the "wastage" of the desk lamp for the entire year and not just Christmas?

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Offline 97hilfel

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #382 on: February 12, 2016, 11:18:26 pm »
I would add the iRBeacon Indiegogo Projct, just because the products are not close to the thing that they claim to have... and they are pretty expensive!
 

Offline MadModder

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #383 on: April 17, 2016, 06:13:51 pm »
Haha, I have seen that "magnetic motor" POS too many times on youtube.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/new-energy/x/10829146#/

The video is stolen from here, with music and everything.  It's 10 years old BS. Still is today. :-DD
« Last Edit: April 17, 2016, 06:23:16 pm by MadModder »
 

Offline nwvlab

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #384 on: June 23, 2016, 06:45:59 am »
I would also add this:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bioring-the-personal-trainer-on-your-finger#/

Of course indegogo, of course flexible goal.
Of course only rendered images (besides, as if the uC, the "thin-super-magic-battery", and the three sensors were enough to implement what they want!). No real photos of real working hardware. The only photos are a milled piece of plastic (I bet there is nothing inside! Beside plastic.)

Cheers!

PS: and this is between the best startup in the atmel blog!
« Last Edit: June 23, 2016, 06:48:59 am by nwvlab »
 

Offline System Error Message

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #385 on: June 23, 2016, 07:23:29 am »
regarding how much power something uses, my PC when turned off uses 20W or more because of the PSU and that the motherboard is EATX. standby uses 1W more.

I have a chinese LED lamp that isnt particularly good quality, it uses 12W regardless when plugged in whether it is charging or not. The light itself is rated 1W but the whole unit uses 12W all the time even on a fully charged battery with the lights turned off. Routers and modems will use lots of watts regardless of load whether the CPU is fully loaded or not which is why i complain about consumer routers lacking SFP and other modular features in order to eliminate the need for a modem.

Good quality items will always use very little power.
 

Offline zhenning

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #386 on: August 01, 2016, 02:32:04 am »
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fabtotum-prism#/

We are still active and running but still we need more time. We apologies and hope to have news soon, "we are eager as well to see results popping up". Regards, FABteam
 

Offline FrankBuss

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #387 on: August 01, 2016, 07:33:51 am »
Some updates of previously posted projects here:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tcharger-the-next-generation-wireless-charger
Last update: 7 months ago, 155 angry comments :-DD

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/janulus/trinity-portable-wind-turbine-power-station
Last update: october 2, 2015
Funding suspended, but looks like some credit cards were still charged?

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/self-sustaining-electric-generator-prototype
Project page in "draft mode" now? Wasn't this funded? Reading the backers comments would be very funny :)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/beta-bioled-the-first-hand-held-blood-analyzer
Last update: 2 years ago
Only 43 comments, last 2 years ago, did they delete all comments?
But they are still active on their Facebook page, posting angry birds figures: https://www.facebook.com/ArchimejTechnology/ Maybe bought from the backers money  :P And looks like they recently got more money from an award. Last Youtube video from 2014, can't find any information on a working prototype. I don't know, this project looks at least physically possible.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
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Offline maiakaat

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #388 on: August 25, 2016, 11:59:44 am »
Is this plausible given the power requirements, and typical size of "portable" aircon units

Seems a bit unlikely to me

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1253665084/zero-breeze-the-worlds-coolest-portable-air-condit
 

Offline rollatorwieltje

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #389 on: August 26, 2016, 10:28:10 am »
Is this plausible given the power requirements, and typical size of "portable" aircon units

Seems a bit unlikely to me

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1253665084/zero-breeze-the-worlds-coolest-portable-air-condit
Same BS as that Noria window unit.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kurt/noria-cool-redefined

A compressor AC that can run 5 hours on a battery, yeah right.

They claim they use 64 18650 cells... That would be about 640Wh. If it can run for 5 hours it would draw only 120W or so, about the same as a fridge. That's supposed to cool a room? It's only just enough to keep a small isolated box cool, something tells me it doesn't do anything significant when placed in a room.

According to Wikipedia a car AC consumes about 3kW. My small split unit about 500 to 600W.

Look at that claim, a 50sqft room down to 44 def F (7 deg C). LOL.
 

Offline jfktrey

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #390 on: August 28, 2016, 01:38:18 am »
Behold, the 100% unlicensed Pokemon Go accessory: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1193114899/revolutionary-game-controller-for-the-1-app-in-the/
Do a quick Ctrl+F for the words "Pokemon", "Pokeball", or "Nintendo".

My favorite part is how they claim to do image recognition to find the ball using the phone's camera.

Be sure to watch the "Tech update" video featuring their super secret hardware, which I'm pretty sure is just an Arduino: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1193114899/revolutionary-game-controller-for-the-1-app-in-the/posts/1662245

EDIT Holy shit. I just looked closer, and it really is just an arduino. Check it out: http://imgur.com/a/m0S5C
« Last Edit: August 28, 2016, 02:00:52 am by jfktrey »
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #391 on: August 28, 2016, 06:07:29 am »
What's wrong with using an Arduino? In fact, wouldn't they like it to be a secret (as in secret hardware) if they did? They wouldn't want world+dog replicating it, after all.
 

Offline Delta

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #392 on: August 28, 2016, 09:59:58 am »
Behold, the 100% unlicensed Pokemon Go accessory: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1193114899/revolutionary-game-controller-for-the-1-app-in-the/
Do a quick Ctrl+F for the words "Pokemon", "Pokeball", or "Nintendo".

My favorite part is how they claim to do image recognition to find the ball using the phone's camera.

Be sure to watch the "Tech update" video featuring their super secret hardware, which I'm pretty sure is just an Arduino: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1193114899/revolutionary-game-controller-for-the-1-app-in-the/posts/1662245

EDIT Holy shit. I just looked closer, and it really is just an arduino. Check it out: http://imgur.com/a/m0S5C

Having never played that (or indeed, nearly any) tragically pathetic little game, nor ever messed with Arduinos, I have no idea what this product actually does, nor if it is likely to work as advertised.

Are you saying it can't work and is therefore a scam?

Or just that someone has made an Arduino-based device to sell to saddos?  If so, that's not "dodgy", just good business.
 

Offline Kilrah

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #393 on: August 28, 2016, 10:36:34 am »
It would require the game creators to buy into the idea and develop support for the thing into the game, which you can presume there is nearly no chance it would happen since the whole thing makes no sense in the first place.

They say they'd refund "minus fees" if it didn't work out, but of course you've got no guarantee they'll do it.
 

Offline nwvlab

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #394 on: September 21, 2016, 06:07:30 am »

Offline djacobow

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #395 on: September 22, 2016, 06:07:37 pm »

Sion Solarcar

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sion-a-solarcar-for-everyone-car-solar#/

Already funded to the dune of EUR 200,000.

Claim is to deliver EUR 16,000 vehicle (I'd swear it was 13,000 last I checked) minus battery. Also claims to be able to go 30 km a day on solar alone.

I can't help but noticed that most of the solar cells appear to be mounted vertically. That means that it will be impossible for more than half of them to ever been in the sun at once. Figure in that cities tend to have buildings which cast shade, I think getting more than a couple kWh daily would be hard, which will not take any of the currently available EVs 30 km. (Current EVs get about 30kWh/100 miles or 5.3 km / kWh https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform&path=1&year1=2014&year2=2016&vtype=Electric)

So to get more range, this startup is unlikely to have lighter motors, batteries, controls, power electronics, or passengers. So their plan is carbon fiber. But how much lighter could they possibly make it? And if they got that kind of range, could it possibly still be street legal?)

I don't know if it's a scam or naivatee, but this thing does not seem possible.

 

Online McBryce

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #396 on: September 23, 2016, 07:39:18 am »
Forget the technical impossibilities, for €200K he won't even have the cash for a single crashtest, let alone the certification, homologation etc he would need to put it on the road.  :palm:

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Offline djacobow

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #397 on: September 23, 2016, 05:36:07 pm »
Forget the technical impossibilities, for €200K he won't even have the cash for a single crashtest, let alone the certification, homologation etc he would need to put it on the road.  :palm:

McBryce.

Right, which makes me wonder what they will do with their EUR 200k. They could waste it on noodling with solar cars (which, admittedly, sounds like fun) or they could pocket it. But what they cannot do is build a car company.
 

Offline janoc

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #398 on: September 29, 2016, 08:15:17 am »
Anyone has seen this one?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1556758830/aten-the-worlds-first-interstellar-space-vehicle/

There is even the obligatory reference of all nutjobs there - Nicola Tesla! He apparently invented antigravity too, who knew!

 

Online McBryce

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Re: List of Dodgy Crowd Source Funded Projects
« Reply #399 on: September 29, 2016, 08:23:54 am »
Wow, and they're going to do all that with $25K !! (not enough to pay a small team of engineers for 24 hours). They've really thought this one through.

McBryce.
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