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Wireless Power Recharging Nears Fruition
AlexanderT writes "Mobileread.com is reporting that wireless power recharging of mobile devices may become commercially available by the end of this year. Various recently filed patents by Cambridge UK-based Splashpower Ltd. indicate how close the company is in realizing this technology."
" There are several small problems with this, the first being that it still requires wires! "
It still isnt 'wireless'...
I've seen this company make this announcement before. And before that, there was the statement that major cellular manufacturers including Nokia and Motorola were interested in the technology. Yeah, no duh, they'd be interested, but the company played it up as though they'd signed contracts to have the tech included in their products, which was definitely not the case. And the graphic images that are being shown haven't changed in about 18 months, at the very least. Show us a working prototype at some conference and I'll kiss whoever built it, but for now I don't believe this company will ever produce a product. They have a great idea, but I don't believe they know how to make it a reality.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I have countless wall-warts trying to provide various flavours of low voltage stuff to charge / power my electronic gear. I have things that have identical connectors that provide dangerously different voltages. So, having a wireless charging mat you could just drop your mobile phone on is great; it would be far greater if the technology is sensibly licenced, for instance, the charging equipment could be patented, with royalty fees payable to the inventor (what is this? someone on Slashdot extolling the virtues of patents?).. But the receiving equipment could be royalty free, or maybe even subsidised. This would mean that, for instance, Nokia phones might be able to charge with the same transmitting equipment as a Motorola walkie-talkie, as a Garmin GPS, as a no-named chinese portable DVD player. .. but providing the wireless charging was OPTIONAL, this wouldn't be a problem - you could still charge all the above equipment using traditional ugly wall-warts, but you could also charge with the standard wireless equipment.
The inventor could then sell funky wireless recharding pads to the end users, maybe at a premium price, because you'd only need one (or maybe two - one for the home, one for the office). You're paying for the incredible convenience of it all; in much the same way as mobile phone users tend to have to put up with phone rates an order of magnitude higher than fixed line phoned - they are paying for the convenience of it.
That is, for those of us who still have magnetic media arround like tapes and floppys (renember those)
From what i gather, this is inductive power transmission and limited by distance. ...
Well, theres another kind: microwave transmission, which is also a demonstrated technology. Theorethically, we could beam power to any distance with it
At one point, Mitshubishi was planning on deployment of sattellite system that would have beamed microwave power to portable devices. SolarBird . They still list a launch date of 2005 but
Heres a Space Solar Power Monitor, a site that keeps tabs on whats happening on WPT front.
Btw, here's a Wikipedia page on microwave tranmission
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Yeah, I had one of those brushes... It lasted about 1 year. After that, the battery wouldn't hold a charge anymore. In an effort to see if I could replace the battery (like I have on my rechargeable razors), I broke it open. It's just a coil of wire on the bottom of the brush. There wasn't even a LOT of wire, so it probably didn't provide too much current.
BTW: I wasn't able to replace the battery without destroying the brush. Worthless.
People have already pointed out the sonicare toothbrush, but this is also used for the Abiocor artificial heart. Especially in the case of something embedded in your body, it's much better to have a system that does not require electrodes sticking out of your skin! And while a toothbrush may fit in your pocket, I'd wager a replacement heart qualifies more as a true mobile device!
WOuldn;t such a setup be dangerous? Don't even housing wires produce a nasty field that you wouldn't want in a wall next to a cot?
Lets have the next generation sitting in a strong EM field for 8 hours a day, with thier mobile phones next to thier hearts/in thier pockets, staring at laptop screens all day.
Why not just do some open air nuclear testing upwind of the school?
Don't forget schools selling out again to put thier 5th wireless band technology repeater up (2.5/3G/802.11x...)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Tesla had the unfortunate distinction of being latched onto by a lot of wackos who believed he was some kind of Venutian sent to Earth to save us from our ignorance. This biography illuminates his problems with Edison, who only hated AC because he didn't think of it first. Since the book was written in 1981, the author would not have known about Asperger's Syndrome, but from the accounts of all his quirks, it seems pretty obvious that he was a poster child for the condition. He was also very loyal, almost to a fault, and often to the wrong people. When George Westinghouse complained to Tesla that he couldn't afford to pay him the million dollars he had promised him for the patents on the AC power transmission system, Tesla gave him the rights. Later, when Tesla started running out of funds for his experiments, Westinghouse left him out in the cold. Another interesting thing about Edison: As part of his smear campaign to prove how "unsafe" alternating current was, he held many public demonstrations at which he used AC to electrocute live animals. Nice guy, huh? If I believed in a hell, I'd have to think that Edison is there now, being eternally electrocuted with high currents of the DC he was so fond of.