Slashdot Mirror
Thin, Flexible Printable Battery For Smartcards
cornflux writes "This would be a nice way to power a really smart smartcard: Power Paper, Ltd. has created an alkaline-like energy cell that is (among other things) thin, flexible, and "green." Furthermore, it is printable via a silk-screening process onto paper, plastic, and other flexible materials.
ABCNEWS.com has the story."
I wonder if it will ever replace the current types of batteries??
At this rate, when will we have Linux on a credit card? And are penguins accepted at Olympics? Because they won't take my American Express ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I wouldn't accept any battery if it wasn't green.
[insert random fortune here]
At roughly $22 for the equivalent power of a AA, I doubt that they will add these to anything that doesn't absolutely require them.
That's not my hand.
it will only work if the power per Kg is better than current
;- )
devices only need power when pluged in so its easy to add an extra pin for power
it will only work if it has enough for Bluetooth
(which is made for low power devices unlike 802.11b)
otherwise its an outside technology
I am waiting for fuelcells
(no dear I have not been drinking my phone smells of ethanol
regards
john jones
Now my credit card won't lose it's information... oh wait, it's info is statically encoded...
Ok, I just gotta ask, what application on/for a smartcard would use this? All smartcards I know of need a reader, and the reader usually provides the power to the smartcard for it to do it's thing... why would smartcards benifit from this? Are they going to put LCD displays on smartcards now? Thats really the only use I can think of, since every other use requires a reader anyway, so there's no point in the smartcard having a self contained power source...
I'm very open to someone pointing out an application I may have missed, but I just can't think of anything in today's world that would need this for a smartcard... (I can think of lots of other uses for non-smartcard devices though...)
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
...the Fifth Element: It' GREEN!!!
I'll bet these are those guys that keep calling tech support saying they spilled coke in their printer again.
It's pretty obvious that the power/weight ratio of this type of battery is significantly smaller than the one of a standard AA batery. More than that, the article fails to mention the exact capacity or stand-by leaking current. Which pretty much means that the average lifetime of such a battery is inferior to the one of a regular battery (if it were superior, I'm sure they would have mentioned it).
The Raven
The Raven
...inasmuch as one of the main deterrents IMHO to more widespread use of smartcards for digital cash and suchlike is the ease with which anything on the card can be cracked. Having power onboard a smartcard would allow it to be much more resistant to physical attack than it is at present (e.g. it could detect intrusion and wipe any sensitive information).
It also makes it much simpler to ensure the integrity of the information on the card and so simplify the programming model. (At present, the card - and any code that it runs or that it interacts with - has to gracefully handle removal of power at any time. Doing that correctly is quite tricky...)
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
You could use the "paper" batteries with some electro-floruscent ink, and combine with your traditional dead tree media (newspaper, mag, and textbook) and you would have some cool new ads for computer junk and illumnated text to boot. Also would be cool for maps, starcharts, and lan-party flyers.
"Get them before they get....
The horror story in my head is that these things get cheap enough to be used to power animated and interactive displays on the boxes you see from products in department stores, etc.
I have visions of products shouting out to you to "buy me" as you walk down the product aisles. The real world equivalent of banner ads and popup displays.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Before 9/11, I would have been thrilled to see something like this which could be used to improve existing security systems. (For instance, I'll be the first one to buy a SecurID-style setup that uses these things in authenticators the size and thickness of business cards - kiss replayable passwords goodbye.) However, with the ever-present push to implement a national ID card system, this technology is just another facilitator to making the USA even more of a police state.
With traditional smart card systems, the government could force us (through "voluntary measures" of course, which would be required in airports and to drive) to carry a card that contained our biometric IDs, medical records, and discipline records from grade school. These are horribly intrusive devices, but they pale in comparison to an active, powered smartcard. Think of the possibilities: GPS tracking and reporting, for starters. How about making these cards transmit an "I'm here" signal every few seconds, so that the government knows when you're in the area? Forget tracking and triangulation on cell phones (you can turn them off) - they could force us to carry a card around with us that tells businesses and government agencies where we are, what we are doing and saying, and everything about our past.
Think I'm paranoid? Listen to a few of Ashcroft's speeches on CNN and think again. They'd do it in a heartbeat if they could get popular support. And that won't be hard to do if we lose a couple more tall buildings.
~wally
* Not much power. 1/22 of an AA batt. wont power much for very long. even LCD screens are rather power intensive. and since it has a rather high cost, wouldnt we have to pay for replacement creditcards quite often?
* Not rechargeable (is it?) You'd either have to replace the entire device or recharge the paper, when the batt. dies. These dont seem too replaceable, they're far too propritary/embedded
Aside from that...I could see all kinds of fun uses for this..especialy when combined with e-ink...You could have, for example..a reuseable newspaper. Hell, make it glow while we're at it. The use this will probly be put to is however some sort of tracking system. Build a little antena into my new smartcard, and Amex can tell exactly where I am at all times. If you put it into my drivers licence, so could the goverment. Fun, aint it?
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
into a small cylinder, put it in your mouth, light it up and watch your cigarette consumption drop. Sure beats nicorette.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Then, I read the article and info on their site and had to do some thinking.
Basically, I still think it would be good for wearables.
Some quotes from the supplied links -
The resulting battery is about half a millimeter thick -- the same thickness as the paper used to make milk cartons.
...has developed a battery that can be printed directly onto paper, plastic or other flexible material.
Can be manufactured in any custom size or shape
Two to three layers of this could be made into the inside lining of a bulky jacket/overcoat.
To produce as much power as a standard AA-sized battery, for instance, would require a Power Paper battery of about a square foot in size.
Given 2 or 3 layers in a jacket AND most of the jacket real estate being the power supply, this would be enough for a low-power computing device.
Obviously, higher power cells or thinner cells would be neccesary to power current wearables as while they're relatively low-power devices, the display is always a major source of power drain. So, while I'm not saying anyone should go out there and do it immediately, I definitely see potential for it in the future...
Recharging of the batteries could be accomplished using a combination of solar (thereby making the jacket look cool) and energy gained from movement (as with a few rather nifty watches out there).
Ben de Waal. yttriumox@softhome.net
-- Not an anonymous coward, just too lazy to create a slashdot account, I post about once a year on average, I read daily.
It sure would explain a lot :)
So how long will this battery last? It's non rechargable, and "good for low drain situations" according to the site. This would be good for many things if there was a decent battery life.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Looks like SIM card. Can anyone confirm this?
I mean really. Besides, when you have all that real estate you might as well just stick a cell-phone style Lithium-ion battery somewhere. It would work just as well, and provide a lot more power.
besides you don't need a whole coat to achieve a 'wearable' computer would to get a PDA and plug in some headgear.
And you're also missing the most obvious reason to electrify a coat. Keeping you warm.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wasn't the point of the patent to prevent companies from keeping scientific knowledge secret? According to this guy, the chemical formula is closely guarded. Does this mean they didn't get a patent? I can't imagine it would be very hard to just analyze a battery to see what it was made of.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
burris
Just the type of battery power needed for a mail bomb... Or a GPS+transmitter from the government to track your movement.
You don't need batteries for a credit cards. Smart card have power pins already. Might as well have solar power on the card too...
Power Paper even envisions that its flexible battery designs can be used to help secure airports and passengers. Luggage tags and airline tickets could be printed with tiny radio antennas and circuitry -- powered by the company's battery -- to contain passenger data.
Great. Please make sure you seatbacks and traytables are in their full upright and locked positions, all you carryon items have been safely stowed in an overhead bin or under the seat in front of you, and all cellular phones, portable electronics, and luggage tags have been turned off prior to departure.
Not to mention it's a stupid idea anyway. The tages the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.
One reason that ebooks haven't taken off yet is that it's rather cumbersome, carrying your laptop all over creation just to read a book. Using this as a power source, and a single-page lcd screen, you might just have an ebook that was portable enough to carry around like a regular paperback.
The battery is replaceable, and it shouldn't be hard to download different texts into it... or, maybe, store the texts on a novram card. Sell whole textbooks like this, and make it easier for students to carry the whole load.
These paper batteries could easily be used, whereas conventional batteries are rather heavy and bulky, still.
Lemon curry?
Could anyone tell me what TFM stands for? I didn't catch it from the article.
Why not use butane instead of ethanol for your mobile fuel cell? Then you can pop down your newsagents or gas station and buy a cigarette lighter refiller to charge your phone, more convienient than trying to find ethanol late at night on a Sunday.
Anyway, you are taking a very narrow view: you take an invention of mass consumption and say it will only work if it can power Bluetooth??? I think rather it will only work if production is cheap enough to power musical/flashing Christmas cards (let's get realistic here).
Phillip.
http://www.FutureEnergies.com/
Property for sale in Nice, France
Front Edge Technology supposedly makes the worlds thinnest battery, however. And these are rechargeable.
Their website has the complete specs, power dissapation curves and more.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Front Edge Technology makes some pretty cool thin film rechargable batteries. They have a nice page with full specs.
Probably going to use all this technology to tag all humans some day.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Quite nice...but... one thing, does this mean that when I get my credit card out there is going to be a live streaming colour video of the bank manager waving his finger at me telling me I cant by the Logitech THX 4.1 Speakers - Z-560 from thinkgeek. Suk.
However the pages that I read lacked a phrase that I was looking for: ISO 7816 Compliant. This is the specification that dictates the characteristics of a smart card. The flexibility, durability, and size of the card are dictated. This is important because these cards need to be able to live for years in people's wallets and occasionally even be used to scrape ice off of car windshields. :) And if a card with this battery is ISO 7816 compliant, then Power Paper should really mention it. If not, then they need to work on it before it will gain market acceptance. Phrases such as "highly flexible" just won't cut it if it isn't compliant.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Whatever happened to that flat cell phone someone was working on?
Cowboy hats (perhaps 10 gallon) will go from hick (or chic) to geek real fast if they can supply more power than a baseball cap. Keep in mind that hats do not have to be as flexible as regular clothes.
Some of the other problems with this:
It seems that it would really only be useful for small, flexible, probably disposable applications. Having already ripped on the idea of using it for luggage tracking, i will say that one possible use is parking permits. A hangtag with a solar cell, battery, and small readout could display up to the minute information on where you can park, when a shuttle is coming, etc. With printable display technology it might not be much more expensive than the plastic hangtags we use now (and if you thought the little hologram made them hard to duplicate...), and either way would pale in comparison to the $$ we fork over. The downside is that the permit could figure out if it was parked in the wrong spot and turn on the Parking Gestapo Beacon.
Interesting idea. Well covered by /.ers.
My $0.02 to toss into the ring is e-books, one-use disposable books the size of a credit card. once the battery runs out, its time to buy another copy of Lord of the Rings.
On second thought, I hope no deadtree publishers read this comment...
Surely the energy stored in a battery is proportional to the volume of electrolyte, so batteries which are excessively thin will not have a long life, and will have to be very 'wide' to make up the volume. The width would have to be disproportionately increased to make up the volume.
So let me ask -- what do you do with the smart card when the battery runs out? Throw it away? That kind of defeats the purpose of the smart card as a security/storage device.
I cringed when I saw the line that these batteries are environmentally safe. Sure, the actual batter might be, and the manufacturing processes might be as well. But encouraging people to use lots of short-lived, nonbiodegradeable devices and then toss them out sure isn't! And that ignores whether the rest of the products they're encouraging people to (eventually) use these in are environmentally friendly.
Most governmental "crime fighting measures" are so poorly designed that they intrude on honest citizens' lives, and do little to fight crime. Consider:
- Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?
- Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?
- Carnivore. As if a terrorist with half a brain can't use PGP?
- Key escrow. As if terrorists won't be able to find an old copy of PGP to use?
- Stopping curbside checkin. As if that will help stop hijackings?
The only good Congress is a Congress that isn't passing laws (except laws that benefit techies).~wally
good, a replacement energy. My body was becoming ressistant to cafeine
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
well, if we're going to act like we know what we are talking about we should do our homework first. batteries can be measured in ENERGY / WEIGHT but power per weight is meaningless.
So, would the Feds (or the Homeland Security Police, our counterpart to the KGB) force us to replace depleted batteries? If a few million people sabotaged their replacement cells, the HSP couldn't keep up. We could claim defective batteries.
Make metal boxes illegal? Metal foil would have to be, too. Another case of the criminals successfully fighting the system, and the innocent suffering.