ordered a second hand 800w car alternator for 20€, want to try hook it up to my old exercise bike and see what I can get out of it, maybe charge some 12v batteries with it if it works
now to just get a v-belt and some mounting and tensioning gear, I already have a battery and charge controller that should do the trick, it'd be amazing if I could make this whole thing work for less than 50
received the alternator, seems smooth in operation which is nice, it'll probably get more heavy if there's a load on it but it's nice to have a workable baseline.
The exercise bike actually seems to have a belt similar to the car V belt, maybe I can somehow use a car V belt to make it work, although not sure where to mount the alternator yet.
@anthropy hopefully you already know this, but many (most?) modern alternators require power to function. They use electromagnets in the rotor instead of permanent magnets.
@rolenthedeep I have a bunch of 12V batteries and a bunch of 12V power regulators, I was going to try and mess with that and see if I could get it working- I knew there were some differences between the designs, I think some versions even generated AC and required rectification? but I actually hadn't heard of them using electromagnets these days, I do wonder if it'll work, we'll see how it goes, thanks for the tip though!
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