alt Hacker NewsI don’t think this has much practical application as an entire system. Nor is it supposed to. It was built just to achieve and artificial goal with arbitrary constraints. That doesn’t make it any less cool or interesting, but that doesn’t make it useful.
Some of the features he used are pretty cool though, like varying the winding drum diameter to vary the delivered torque over the course of the weight drop.
I could for sure see it being used to launch seeds-bombs, or emergency rations, or make a pressure wave on a snow overhang - if the evolution of this interesting experimentation results in a portable version, it would be immensely useful. As a crop protection device, given some kind of energy-harvesting recharging method, a la wind.
A bit of imagination makes it very useful.