YouTube filmmaker and DIY-engineer Thomas Kim harnessed the power of water to charge his iPhone. Meanwhile, my iPhone battery is dead because the outlet is just out of reach from my bed and ugh. If we competed against one another in some sort of survivalist contest, my only hope of beating Thomas Kim would be to curl up into a ball and hope he’d exhaust himself.
Kin's water wheel generator is made from recycled "plastic bottles, disposable platters, 3 Phase stepping motor, [and a] rectifier circuit." The bad news is I don’t know which part is which. The good news is I can still blame my inability to construct a homemade generator on my dog eating the rectifier circuit.
Please explore Thomas Kim’s YouTube page. It’s like he took the cliché cable survivalist show, and stripped away the ego and flashy graphics. What remains is novel engineering, inventions, and DIY projects. It's smart and inspiring stuff. An as they say, you never know when you’ll need to turn a ping pong ball into an electrostatic motor.