Energy Harvesting - Kinetic

I posted a lot of kinetic energy harvesting links in the first post on all this energy harvesting stuff but they mostly focused on piezoelectricity. I'm trying to avoid piezoelectricity for a bit (because there's just so much research) and so these links are related more towards other methods of harvesting energy from movement.

Electromagnetic

• "Generating Electricity While Walking with Loads" in Science (related to this article I mentioned in my first post)
• The NightStar flashlight
• Perpetuum, producers of the PMG17 vibration energy harvester

General

• "Energy harvesters extract power from light, vibrations"

Unfortunately, progress on this essay is much slower than I'd like. The materials all pretty interesting and I'm enjoying the reading but the writing is hard work. I don't understand the more physics/electronics bits of the technologies (so generally I appreciate the applications of specific harvesting methods but don't fully understand the methods themselves) which might be contributing but I'm just finding it pretty hard to focus and assemble the material into something coherent and vaguely valuable. As of today I also seem to be coming down with Hobnob's lurgy :(

On a slightly happier note, Wikipedia has just informed me that that the term MEMS (which I've seen all over the place in the literature about kinetic energy harvesting) refers to microelectromechanical systems (micrometre to millimetre scale), so that solves one mystery.

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Previous posts on this topic: Energy Harvesting (5th Feb. '08), Energy Harvesting - BBC Articles (7th Feb '08), Energy Harvesting - BBC Articles (Revisited) (14th Feb. '08), Energy Harvesting - Radiation and Human Active Energy (23rd Feb. '08), Energy Harvesting - Solar Radiation (24th Feb. '08).