A side step to other technologies for harvesting

When looking around for energy harvesting solutions I found quite a bunch of intersting techniques to get motion into energy. A lot of these are highly experimental, but look promising for the future. I'll highlight the things I found most interesting:

Electro-active Polymers (EAP)

Please, please, pleeeeaaassse, can I have these? They are a new way transform between mechanical and electrical energy, in both ways. EAPs can be used as 'muscles' / actuators and as generators

EAP as actuator and as generator. Images from http://www.polypower.com

I can highly recommend browsing polypowers website, a lot of info can be found there.

Another website with info on EAP's, with a very interesting take on the actuators is http://www.hizook.com:, they even have a future vision of an EAP / photocell plane! Now wouldn't that be nice to build with the energy harvesting kit

Maybe it's a bi far-fetched yet, but it looks feasible in the future to me.

Current state of biomechatronic energy harvesting

I'll be short here, as I can't do a good abstract of an article as exhaustive as this, by Riemer and Shapiro:

Biomechanical energy harvesting from human motion: theory, state of the art, design guidelines, and future directions

What I found most interesting is that they researched all joints and their respective energy potential. Interesting, interesting.....

Talking about research and energy harvesting from humans, this is what MIT came up with: an "Unobtrusive integration of magnetic generator systems into common footwear[pdf], Hayashida". They integrated two small DC motors and a gearbox into the sole of a sneaker to get energy from the heel strike while walking. The idea and research is very nice, but I would like to hear whether all those gears wouldn't make too much noise...

Concept of generating power by walking; heelstrike generates motion of DC-motor

What about bike lighting?

Ouch, painful subject.... Today I saw on hackaday.com that someone made a bicycle light with help of a relay. He uses something rattling against the spokes to generate energy. It works, but it's not a very charming solution acousticly (unless you're still putting playing cards on your wheel..).

In the comments, however I someone mentioning the magnic light kickstarter. Now this is doing everything I wanted to do with my project, but then better; contactless energy out of the motion of the wheels, no problems with snow, rain, no maintenance, no batteries. The circuit is based on eddy currents gnerated in the rim of the wheel, and I have to find out how they've done it, as I wouldn't know how they're transforming the electromagnetic  field of those eddy currents back to usable energy. I mean, to me it looks like you'd get an opposing magnet field back, which contains no fluctuation, so you can't use a transformer... Anyways, I have to see what this means for my design, as this is a legion higher in elegance than I could ever make using saddle motion.....

For now: a picture