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Flexible, Plastic Sheets of Power
bethr writes "Imagine never having to plug in an electronic device to get power? Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated prototype plastic sheets with copper coils that wirelessly supply power to any device that touches its surface. You just put down your laptop and the pad sends it power: 'An array of organic transistors that detect the position of the gadget and direct current flow.' Apparently, the researchers had enough time to create a spiffy video of their doll house model, complete with a mini Christmas tree, showing off the technology."
Isn't this kind of like Slashpads?
They have reinvented the transformer, except this time there is an open end on it.
They had better paint it bright red and put warning signs over it, or it will start melting anything placed upon it.
(I assume I am not the only one to throw my keys and change and the rest of my pocket crap out when I get home)
liqbase
Last time I was buying them at home depot, a socket was 79 cents and a cord was a few bucks. Why should I want to replace an already mature, tested, cheap, reliable technology with something that costs a whole lot more, and may direct power to where it is not wanted?
Nicola Tesla would be proud...
How safe is it to have an open source of electricity? It says devices need a special coil to receive charging, but does this stop a stray hand from getting zapped?
I know some doctors, who feel that wires (to power/recharge their equipments) is a big distraction when they want to focus on examination. This could be a good news for them.
hilarious
And you'll have the Triforce of Power. haha, i'll be here all my life!
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
... power a laptop that can play Duke Nukem Forever?
This sig is false.
How efficient are these compared to regular adapter + cable? The lack of a magnetic core may mean your utilities bill goes up x2.
If they can make this cheap (a few bucks?) then I would prefer it to having to plug my cell phone in. Much easy to lay my cell phone down flat than plugging it in (and sometimes breaking the connector after n uses). Same with laptop (cause I move around with it a lot).
I agree not everyone is willing to pay a few extra dollars for ease of use. But there are some who do. For example, I know people who bought the iPod over cheaper competing products with equal capacity because they preferred the click wheel navigation that saves time measured in seconds.
Is this the same principle as how my wife charges her vibr... ahem... Sonicare toothbrush?
n/t
That and this together could make for an interesting tent one day, amongst other things. Add in flexible displays etc and you could be applying for research grants from DoD and DHS. Portable command centers anyone? Portable geek huts?
So.. wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that it would cause serious electrical interference to sensitive devices, such as laptops?
Sigs are for the weak.
Remember the scene in A Christmas Story where the kid licks a metal pole? I keep getting this picture of a kid licking the power strip and the electronics deciding his tongue was an electronic device badly in need of a 120 volts. I can hear the chanting now, "you'll blow your eye out, you'll blow your eye out."
How does it differenciate between the different wattages that all my devices take? I don't want to start cooking my ipod because this thing is giving it laptop voltages...
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Here's a few things I'd like to apply this stuff too.
... power strip stuff.
1) Wireless mouse pad
2) Magnetic track-type lighting
3) Stove top -- Pots/pans/ect would have their own unique heating elements & the entire stove top would be usable
I'm sure there's plenty of practical applications for somthing like that plastic power...
4) Power strips with 100% usable surface area.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Physicists Promise Wireless Power is cooler.... Check the article also to preempt the cancer paranoia comments (aka toxoplasma talk ) and tesla refferences. This looks more like a demo of the organic, flexible transistors. It could be done with more conventional electronics. I don't quite see the point over a magnetic connector or something, either. The mention of "resistance" in TFA should be replaced with "reactance", should it not?
Would be neat if we could put something like this in roads. Vroom! There's already a lot of power near roads. Electric cars that charge as you drive. Refueling is automatic; cars check in at a pay station once a month for a meter read.
Obviously the Tesla effect is not what's interesting here. Its the direction of power to the device that is interesting. You have this big power sheet and it only sends power where there is a device that needs it.
... maybe ...
The obvious place for this power supply is your chair and bed. You can sit down with your cell phone in your pocket and have it recharge while you work at your computer.
The big deal application of this kind of technology is probably computer implants. Its hard to change the batteries of a computer that's embedded in your thigh, but now it can recharge while you sleep.
I see a big market for upholstery and bedding growing out of this device.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
You can easily try this at home yourself. Just disable the safety switch on your microwave, and run it with the door open.
You can induce up to a kW in things like forks and aluminium foil.
It even warms up my hands and head on the inside while I hold my devices near the oven.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Power Over WIRELESS Ethernet. Wake me up when it's done.
This has actually already been invented but not lasted because of multiple reasons. Maybe vaporware, maybe not but the waiting game is still a factor for them too. Good luck though. I have a lot of wires that I don't like to plug in all this electronic crap that gives me tumors.
Who is that masked man?
This is me not holding my breath.
> 3) Stove top -- Pots/pans/ect would have their own unique heating elements & the entire stove top would be usable
I liked your other ideas but this one is terrible. Every pot & pan in your kitchen would heat differently than the other, and not in that minor way that can be attributed to shape and thickness and easily judged at a glance.
If you're at all into cooking then the only heat on your stove top should come from actual bare flame that you can see with your eyes. All other options are inferior and seem to be the result of making cooking and food secondary considerations to things like energy supply and easy cleanup.
Install gas. Clean accordingly.
After you've cooked over flame you'll hate anything else.
Did anyone else notice the second LED turn on while the little model laptop was close to it, but NOT making contact? Energy in the air, mang!
Apparently a lot of readers don't understand what induction is, and that this power pad works off that principle. Power isn't routed to a device on top of the pad like many people seem to think. There's no electrical contact between the power source and the device on top of the pad. The device in need of power will have a coil of wire. The power pad will detect where on the pad the device is and then create a virtual coil of wire underneath the device. The two coils of wire do not touch, but they are near enough each other that they create and air-core transformer. In other words, AC current traveling in the pad's coil will electro-magnetically INDUCE an AC current in the device's coil. This is really, really old science. The problem is that in order to transfer a significant amount of power efficiently, the two coils have to be closely coupled to one another. This means that the power pad's coil has to have a small cross-section and be located directly under the device to be powered. By detecting where the device is with, say, a pressure sensor, and then using semiconductors to dynamically route a current in a virtual coil directly underneath the device, this power pad allows for the device to be placed haphazardly in virtually any location on top of the pad. This is the same principle that Sonicare toothbrushes use to charge, but imagine now being able to put the toothbrush anywhere on the counter to charge instead of inside a dedicated charging station.
Just the thing I need for the walls of my torture chamber. (For reality TV, of course.)
Nowhere in the article does it say there are pressure sensors. It says it uses resistance changes to detect a target. The keys example is also fud, there's no support from the article that keys would be detected as a target, or even used as a target.
He did that decades ago, and actually had the idea instead of recycling it. Wasnt practical then either.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As they note in the article, this is a refinement on Inductive Charging. I used to love my inductively charged toothbrush; place it on it's stand (just a smooth white bump), and it charged, no physical electrical contact required.
Does anyone know why they need to actively sense the location of the object, and route the energy specifically to it? Inductive energy isn't "consumed" unless there's a draw on it. For example, a common example of induction is in a wall-wart transformer; one set of windings goes between the 120v from your wall, which is inductively coupled to an (ummmm, larger, I think) winding on your 12v side; as long as there's no load on the 12v side, there won't be a draw on the 120v side (aside from losses; transformers aren't perfectly efficient, which is why a wall transformer might be slightly warm, even when not being used).
Is it the inefficiency of such losses that require active routing, or another reason?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Although I like the idea I'm wondering about radiation/emission issues. We're already surrounded by quite a lot of emissions which are to a degree shielded.
In this case shielding is obviously not possible , and it's also not exactly lossless. I'd stick with a cable.
Having said that, I'm looking for something to get 12V 30mA on the other side of a 10mm glass sheet so I haven't decided yet if that's better done magnetically or via capacity.
Insert
Is this not more useful? wireless extension cord The contact requirement of the pad almost seems as much of a tie down as a wire. Plus, with the wireless you can probably reheat your coffee while on the laptop by just raising you mug in the air...
"Tesla did it!"
Mine sits on a stand which recharges its internal battery by induction, so such a thing is hardly a big surprise to me! It's an ideal case for inductive power: a device which gets wet in use, needs to be hygienically sealed, recharging uses very little power, and there are no sensitive electronic devices nearby for it to interfere with.
Mind you, electric kettles are a similar case, yet modern cordless kettles seem to have worked out how to do safe direct electrical connection even when there's likely to be splashes of water around. But then I doubt you could transfer that amount of power inductively. (Laptops may be power-hungry, but not yet to that degree!)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The whole-house idea is overambitious, but, on a smaller scale, it would be a great way to recharge portable devices. You'd have a pad, or maybe a shallow tray, where, at night, you put your small portable devices - phone, music player, PDA, electric razor - for recharging. It would need to be standardized, so that all the gadgets could use a common system. You'd have one tray at home, probably in the bedroom. A travel version roll-up pad with a cord and wall transformer would be necessary. Deployment in business hotels would be useful.
-b.
Wiiiiii
Not sure if this is an urban legend or not, but 33Hz is supposed to BE their frequency. Can someone recommend a MS-Winblows pure tone-generator app so my girl and I can test this? F'r the science, o' course!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Sell a pad like a big mousepad and compatible replacement batteries for an existing laptop. Since most laptops have batteries on the bottom, you could have your laptop continually trickle-charged while it's sitting on the pad.
Nobody will buy this unless it works with most devices. Would you pay (say) $129.95 to eliminate two cords out of the dozen on your desk?
For it work with most devices, device makers would need to be willing to standardize on it.
If device makers were WILLING to standardize, we wouldn't HAVE umpteen different kinds of wall-wart transformers with different voltage and current requirements... and different DC plug configurations.
If every device used the same DC voltage and the same kind of low-voltage DC plug, we could have multi-outlet low-voltage power supplies in a single compact box, or built in behind the faceplace. That would achieve 90% of the convenience of this technology at 10% of the cost.
That doesn't happen because nobody voluntarily standardizes the low-voltage power inputs on their devices, and nobody will. (The only reason our vacuum cleaners and refrigerators do is because they were pushed to by electrical wiring codes, which don't exist for low-voltage electronics).
Since nobody will standardize their low-voltage power inputs, this is a nice idea that will never happen.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
On the other hand, if you can make the driving surface out of thin film voltaics or have a transparent driving surface with a voltaic layer below it, you wouldn't have much of that heating because the solar cells would convert the radiant energy to electricity directly.
The number one reason that this idea is not practical is that the oil companies would go apeshit and lobby it into the ground like the EV1 in Cali. Wee! I think most of these innovations are currently limited by politics rather than the scientific feasibility. I mean, suppose you did fab these voltaic/battery roads and had cars drawing power from them. Well, that's an economic "No, no" since the extremely powerful petroleum companies would take a big hit on revenue and the government hates it when that happens to big business. We can't suddenly have cars running around on renewable energy that is free after the build costs. No gas stations, huge loss of maintenance revenue for automotive companies because eletric engines have far fewer parts and far lower maintenance costs (no gas processing components at all--exhaust, combustion engine, filters, etc.). Even if I had the brains to explicitly spell out a cost-effective and totally viable method of making this idea work, it would die horribly before becoming a reality. Sure the gas/automotive companies could consolidate and decide to go into the business of building this new solution, but that's effort. And big, powerful, very wealthy, companies are done with their "effort" stage unless they are forced into it by legislation or some factor that it even bigger than they are.
Come on, I want to power my flat panel TV with this stuff!
Didn't Nikola Tesla do this about 100 years ago?
Introduced in 2002, the Wire-Free Electricity Base by Mobilewise was the first device to interrogate loads placed upon it in order to deliver tailored power. Sadly, there were no takers and it faded away.
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
Very cool development but I'm still holding out for my devices (and robots) to run on energon cubes