I'm sure many of us experimented as kids with turning a potato into a battery. I recently re-lived this experience with my seven year old son. It is a fun experiment, but the batteries produce limited voltage and current, so they are not terribly practical.
Bad ass. A Mr. Potatohead robot dream can now be realized. Going to see how this works too when I get a chance. 10x more power. What exactly does that mean… I must find out.
… but what I mean is are we talking from 1uA to 10uA or 1mA to 10mA? I know a potato cell built back in my childhood didn’t make enough current to light a lamp so I was just wondering out loud. Yes, can’t wait to play with my spud!
“I just boiled up a 2400mAH 3S 100P tuber pack. One question… how do I recharge it?”
Without boiling, it would take 2-3 potatoes to light a LED, as I recall. I think that was to get the voltage high enough, and the LED wouldn’t typically glow very brightly (or require a current limiting resistor).
So maybe each potato is 0.5 to 0.8 volts and all together you probably got less than 10mA.
I believe you get better results if your anode and cathode have a lot of surface area. So a strip of metal would work better than a wire, for example. I’ve been thinking about using a series of alternating zinc and copper plates to get higher voltage out of one potato. I imagine multiple plates in one potato will not last as long overall, but I need to try it.
