An AC-DC adaptor that looks and feels like a regular wire.

Adaptors work by having a coil. If many small coils would be used along the way, instead of one large coil, then the adaptor could be "in a wire", i.e. it could be flexible and much less cumbersome than current AC-DC adaptors.
-- pashute, Feb 23 2007

There are two basic types of AC - DC adaptor; there's the traditional transformer plus rectifier plus smoothing capacitor and there's the switch-mode oscillator plus chopper (which also needs a transformer, but much smaller than the power transformer in the other paradigm). I guess you're thinking of the transformer type. They work by first reducing the voltage (in the same ratio as the number of windings on the primary and secondary sides of the transformer), then rectifying the low-voltage AC, then smoothing the lumpy DC. You would only need one rectifier and one smoothing section, but the size of the transformer is determined mainly by the power requirements of the device, and several low-power transformers in series would not be equivalent to one large transformer.

Thus I suggest [marked-for-deletion]: bad science.
-- angel, Feb 23 2007


So you are proposing that rather than have a wallwart with a long thin cord attached, you have a somewhat thicker cord with all the conversion nonsense stretched out inside?

If so, it sounds good to me. Wallwarts are a bane to my existence.
-- Galbinus_Caeli, Feb 23 2007


Golden baby! Yeah! [+]

I think a latter network (low pass filter) could fit into a wire quite nicely in the future. Micro-inductors along the hot wire, and micro-capacitors between the hot wire and the neutral wire (in between inductors).
-- quantum_flux, Feb 24 2007


Build this object in two parts: the first segment is a chain, with each link being a step-down transformer (the link portion, a real genuine soft-iron core for your transformer, is connected by copper wires to the next core, with windings in the ratio for the step-down). Between each of the links is a connector jack - if you plug the tail into a connector, it interrupts the curcuit to the downstream links. The tail portion of the connector contains a bridge rectifier, and the tail cord is a whole string of capacitors in parallel between the pos and neg lines.

By plugging into different connectors, you get different output voltages.

What it lacks in efficiency, it makes up in halfbaked-ness.
-- lurch, Feb 24 2007



random, halfbakery