Socckit

Soccket, is a plug-in soccer ball that captures the energy during game play to charge LEDs and batteries. The ball uses an inductive coil mechanism to generate energy.  After playing with the ball, the child can return home and use the ball to connect a LED lamp to read, study, or illuminate the home. 

Soccket Ball

The clever invention is made from materials found in developing countries and costs only slightly more than a normal high end ball to produce.

Soccket was an engineering class assignment at Harvard University, where co-founders Jessica Lin, Jessica Matthews, Julia Silverman, and Hemali Thakkar quickly bonded over their shared experiences in Africa and other developing countries to create an ingeniously simple portable generator.

The movement of the ball forces a magnet through a coil that induces a voltage to generate electricity and the coil doesn’t affect the motion of the ball. The beauty of soccket is that a kid in a developing nation can play a game of soccer after school, leave the playground, take the ball home, plug a basic lamp into a built-in fixture and have enough light to do homework.

For every 15 minutes played on the first version of sOccket, the ball was able to store enough energy to illuminate a small LED light for three hours. sOccket 2.0 has improved that ratio. Now, less than 10 minutes of play yields three hours of energy.

The ball, which has been trialled in South Africa, is waterproof, durable and doesn't need to be inflated. It uses inductive coil technology which involves having a metal coil and magnetic slug that goes forwards and backwards.

The use of kerosene to light people homes has serious health risks for 1.5 billion people worldwide. Kerosene not only is expensive, but the smoke poses serious health risks and its flames are very dangerous. The World Bank estimates that breathing the fumes created from burning kerosene indoors equals the harmful effects of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

More than 270 million people play soccer worldwide, including 46 million Africans, according to a 2006 FIFA study. In most African countries, 95 % of the population lives without access to electricity, according to a 2006 World Bank Millennium Goals Report. 

The special ball can currently be used with an ac adaptor but the designers hope this will be expanded in the future to enable other products to be charged by it.

Mass production and distribution of these balls in countries without access to electricity, such as most in Africa, could save thousands from the serious health risks bought on through the use of kerosene and can help bring people together through sport and play.