Originally Posted by
rollzone
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so having a hub to power the IPhone excited my possibilities. all the input has been appreciated. still i am not hearing from anyone with any experience using an iPhone away from an electric plug for any extended period of time. i do not want to be dependent upon going into a fast food restaurant, and plugging into their electric wall socket, and having to sit there until i have recharged my batteries. i want complete independence.
i have received correspondence from the president of Pedalpower+. that has been very convincing, with salt. when a president writes to you personally, it says a couple of possible things about the company. the company is either successful with hands-on personal service; or unsuccesful because of a bad product being desperately sold to recoup investment.
he has written about a battery specifically developed to handle gadgets alike the IPhone 3Gs. i was confused through translation about some of his reply. if i knew how to attach the letter here i would. he was saying the battery would have enough juice to recharge the IPhone possibly 5 times were i to take a day off from bicycling. i began thinking he meant i had to recharge the battery in the IPhone every time the battery in the IPhone went low. i wanted to simultaneously operate the radio and maintain the charge in the battery while i am riding. so i asked about the two batteries. he has assured me the new battery will perform as requested. HUB>BATTERY>IPhone to my earbud while i ride. i am guessing it will be up to me to try it.
i have been balking at proceeding hoping for reinforcing experiential knowledge that heretofore has been missing. this has given me confidence about the hub, so i will try to be brave. it is only money, and i have lost much more than this.
Hello Rollzone.
Sorry, reading your post is a little confusing but I think what it seems like is that you want to directly connect your dynamo to the said device. I am not very familiar with the dyanmo electricity generating hubs (never owned one but planning on building a touring wheel+dynamo) but I think that direct connection is
not the best option for the target device. One way to think of these hubs is as literally a generator; the difference between commercial and household generators vs. a dynamo hub is that the output is steady and stable, whereas a dynamo hub's output may be dependent upon your speed and revolutions of the wheel (please correct me if I'm wrong, someone, I am just assuming here).
Charging a device that is not designed to handle varying inputs can be bad for the device or its battery and I believe that what the "company owner" who sent you an email was trying to say is that he has a battery that connects directly to the dynamo hub and acts as a buffer. Once that is charged or charging you may plug your ipod or iphone device to that battery (via usb cable) to charge the ipod/iphone. This buffer is good because it provides the same output (input into the phone for charging)
everytime. Here is one from Dahon that I have been checking out (the Reecharge) but I am still not quite set on what I will actually do, or even the price of it.
http://www.dahon.com/accessories/201...ogic-reecharge
I also believe I read a few posts of some gentlemen talking about some of the same "buffer" batteries of a different brand.
**edit** Quester above me said something similar but its about rechargable AA batteries and then charging the device via that buffer medium. **
I personally think this buffer battery is a much better solution to directly plugging the dynamo to my own iphone. I also have some friends who dont care much for their iphone and perhaps if the price of the external buffer battery is higher than what they value their phones to be then I would suggest to just straight plug it into the hub without the buffer battery.
I hope this helps, and if not feel free to message me or send an email and I can try to elaborate further.
Happy and safe riding
JF