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Wireless Power Consortium Pushes For Standard
Slatterz writes "We've already heard about wireless power before, but now we're a step closer to throwing away our power cables and chargers. A consortium of eight companies has launched an
initiative to develop a wireless power standard. The drive was announced at the first Wireless Power Consortium conference at the Hong Kong Science Park yesterday. Most consumer electronic devices require a different charger, and the resulting tangle of wires and bulky devices is 'ugly, frustrating and inconvenient to use,' the group said. 'Wireless power charging takes away the need for wires and connectors. You simply drop your mobile phone, game device, electric shaver on the charging station and the battery is recharged,' explained Satoru Nishimura, senior manager at Sanyo."
Isn't this "wireless power" stuff just a terrible waste of energy?
Wireless power is only practical in short ranges anyway. With standardized cables I wouldn't have drawerfuls of power cables.
...but that might not be such a good idea.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Short range wireless power is alright, it makes charging a little easier, but the real revolution is going to be when an efficient method of mid-range wireless power is developed.
If you can get wireless power in an entire room then we can finally ditch the last cord to our laptops, which is what consumers are waiting for when they ask for wireless power. If you have to put the items on a tray, it is a little easier, but it might as well be a dock or a physical connection. If you have power to an entire room, your cell phone and mobile devices can charge in your pocket without you worrying, bringing the real convenience.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Wireless Power?! He must be a witch! Burn the Witch!
I see the article is tagged with "cancer", which got me thinking: could all this energy going through the air cause cancer potentially? I know its only a few volts of direct current, but think of the spectrum and the (very high) frequencies of gamma rays and the like, could it be possible? I am no expert in this field by any means, but I have to ask.
Im not an expert with this kind of thing by any means but isn't there a chance that it could cause damage to more advanced devices? anyone have any ideas how they get around that?
Can I put one of these on the floor of my garage and charge my car when I park at night?
Man cords aren't really that bad unless you suffer from down syndrome or something. not bad enough to warrant this type of effort to escape them.
You've seen what happens to tinfoil in a Microwave, right?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Isn't this "wireless power" stuff just a terrible waste of energy?
Transformers (not the Hasbro sort) are basically two adjacent coils, with the difference in the number of windings on each side determining the voltage step-up or step-down.
Here you have what is basically a transformer, just with the coils moved further away from each other. A 1:1 step ratio in a transformer is pretty efficient.
You're not wasting electricity spraying electrons in the air like a water sprinkler, there has to be a circuit before potential can be moved from one coil to the other. Electronics can keep idle current to a minimum. Where's the problem?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
With modern switching supplies there is no reason why the power interface for various electronic devices cannot be standardized.
Standard plug and a standard information bus.
Device tells you what it wants, the supply adjusts to suit. You _might_ have to have two classes of power supplies for low and high power.
Now I don't need 10 million fucking transformers for my electronic devices.
This interface could then be extended to some sort of wireless power interface.
Why can't they ever start with the easy, and _useful_ stuff ??!!
Absolute statements are never true
Actually there's a real risk of damage to less advanced devices, if the battery itself doesn't know to stop charging, the charger must.
IANAP, and I can't fathom how a single wireless charger affecting an entire room could keep track of a dozen devices that don't broadcast their power levels.
Having said that, I would absolutely invest in a "power pad". I'm truly sick of AC adapters.
it's all in the manual. no gadgets required.
There are a number of ideas for "charging pads" or "charging mats" with a matrix of planar coils. The power receiver would be in the back of the item to be charged and rest directly on the pad. They are transmitting power via magnetic coupling, but over much shorter distances (mm, not m). This can actually be done with reasonable high efficiency (>90%). Sorry, I don't have the references on the top of my head.
On the other hand, Witricity is a dog because they are trying to transmit power over a distance on the same order of the coil's radius or farther. Without a winding with much better conductivity than copper, this cannot be very efficient (60-75% is pretty poor). The resonance aspect does not affect the coil transfer efficiency in theory, but it helps in practice because power electronics components are, alas, non-ideal.
If you ever have a chance to see someone demo this, ask them to put the coil axes at right angles to each other and see what happens...
John
Last I checked USB was pretty much the defacto standard power connector already, for low power devices. And you can make a nice looking USB charging dock for SUB a lot more cheaply than you can make these space-wasting power pads.
Actually, cords are a pain for portable gear. Plugging and unplugging, and moving them is very hard on them. I go through a laptop power cord about once a year. They all wear out right where the wire enters the connector on the laptop side. For cell phones, the connectors themselves often break, get dirty or otherwise damaged. Irritating when it happens to the cord. Worse when it happens to the phone.
Other than using a heavier cord, or a heavy support mesh, there's not really much that can be done about it. A charging surface where there's no mechanical connection would be very handy.
You can't develop a standard if you don't have similar technologies, and wireless power developers so far have been coming up with all kinds of different technologies. Remove the part of TFA that makes no sense in light of this, and you end up with an advertisement for this "consortium" disguised as a press release, faithfully and unquestioningly reproduced by PC Authority. Had PC Authority tried to do real journalism rather than simple reproduction, they'd have found that not only are the major proposed schemes so different that the idea of standardization is ridiculous, but that some of the members of the consortium aren't even developing any of those schemes.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
How will people secure their 'Power' networks? They don't secure their wireless networks?
How will you stop your neighbor from intercepting your power transmissions and making them his or her own?
Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
... of trying to transport it in fancy new ways.
My 10-year-old calculator was able to work with only 3 cm^2 of solar cells in a rather dark room. No need for wireless power or batteries.
What about nearby devices that aren't designed to be chared? Won't this charger induce a current in any electronic device that is close enough? Would it only matter for some devices that have hefty transformers or hefty inductors?
why can't we use the same method that charges wrist watches? ie. kinetic energy to power your cell phone.
As most people carry it around in their pants, jackets or bags, just walking around would charge them?
wow a connection free power cradle !
I wish my toothbrush did this
Nullius in verba
It's about the right time to do this. There have been about three competing schemes for smart inductive wireless charging, none of which got any traction. This needs to be standardized, preferably worldwide.
If this works, every business hotel will have a convenient charging pad in every room. We might see charging pads built into cars.
Why don't they simply ask the IEEE to set up a committee on this?
They're fairly neutral, have a pretty good record on making standards, and would have the knowledgeable membership to make informed decisions.
The problem is "requires different chargers," so the obvious solution is to standardize the voltage requirements of electronic devices so that they don't need to use different chargers.
Why are the silly chargers able to plug into the same outlet in the first place? Not because of any physical constant of the universe, but because the market decided that the advantages of standardization outweighed whatever subtle optimization there might have be in (say) running lights at 120 volts DC, vacuum cleaners at 85 volts 50 Hz AC, and refrigerators at 150 volts, 600 Hz AC.
Suggesting that wireless power as an appropriate answer is bizarre.
They could standardize rechargeable battery and button cell voltages and form factors while they're at it. My granddaughter probably thinks I'm telling lies about a mythical Golden Age when I say there was a time when all you needed was four kinds of battery.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While I am a true geek and nerd and whatever else (having 5x more networked devices than the average Joe), I am just SCARED of this idea.
I have cell phones and wireless access points (which I keep FAR away from my pregnant wife and will keep away from the young man), I DEFINITELY deny using a microwave oven unless absolutely unavoidable (once a month?). No I do not have air purifiers and spray "kill 99% germs" shit all around the house, and better have my kids play with my dogs' shit other than operate a microwave oven, I think that wireless power is something I definitely something I want to keep away from: young souls, pregnant women and my testicles. Sure, I am an old FSCK or whatever but I better give it 20 years before using it, so they find out what new crap it will bring around.
Just my 2c. I have all these colleagues (looking like sick old man) eating fastfood every day while I am a vegan (yeah, pleas flame/troll me on this /// or be a true nerd/geek and thing why I am one) ........
I expected it to be obvious for slashdotters, that a high energy beam, going from A to B, has to go trough material X.
Now if material X happens to be something that reacts to masses of electrons or photons going trough it, it will change, and most likely heat that material, depending on its density.
So if you're part of the material X, it is pretty sure that you will be fried. If your brain is, it will distort the electric charges even at much lower power levels.
So who are those idiots that still praise it as "Ooh, we will soon throw away all our cables!"? Someone should give them a straight beam of all the energy his computer and his electric stove needs, trough his head. If he still can think afterwards, his mind will have changed! ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, I be new here!
I got some bad grammar
This is actually a pretty slick concept - I was thinking of when my geeky friends go fishing and bring our PDAs - rather than having six different chargers, just bring one - or better yet, it's already installed in the truck!
That drawer full of different-sized chargers for old phones - gone.
You'd also have one less thing to make & ship with a new phone. If chargers were unified, less chargers would need to be built, and fewer would be thrown away.
Hey - for the next trick, why not unify all the credit card processing machines?
(and as far as "wireless power", it's been around since ... ah, how old is the sun?)
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
I can't wait for my long range tazer. Woohoo!
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
Seriously, if Nikola Tesla's notes were not usurped upon his death by some goverment spooks, we would have had free electricity long ago. He got close to proving the concept with Wardenclyffe tower, before he got funding pulled by greedy bastards. Ironic really, that he made so much money for so many people (even bailed out the worthless Westinghouse), and in the end was left with nothing to wither away, his lifes work stolen, hidden and distorted by the people who really run the world. Beyond the obvious, how many top secret cutting edge technologies have been and being derived from the seeds of his genius?! I bet the stolen compillation of his works is a more fascinating read than Leonardo's sketches, but it will never see the light....
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Thinkgeek sold wireless extension cords
more than two years ago.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml
I was hoping for True Wireless Power (TM), where we can do things such as power a classroom with 30 220 V computers through the air from a central antenna in the front of the room. Just imagine all the new really cool mutations kids would start to have after a while.
If this is the kind of wireless power they're talking about, it might be time to make myself a tin foil hat.
53 49 47 53 20 53 55 43 4B
The wireless pad they are using still needs to be supplied with power. Presumable with one of those non-standard bricks, they are not putting 110/220V on your desk for safety reasons. So the total inefficiency should be 40-80% multiplied by the transformer efficiency.
With todays technology it is perfectly possible to standardize on one plug, that has an extra 2 pins to communicate what power it needs. A transformer that uses that technology only sees a couple of dollars price increase. Everyone wants this but no one wants to be first in adding a few dollars cost to their devices.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
Please do not reward people who do nothing but paste links to their monetized blogs. See here as well.
There are two actual motivations:
- Being able to charge $40 for a hunk of plastic and metal bits worth 50 cents is a nice pool of free money
- Not having to replace your customer's expensive devices after they fry them with a charger they bought at radio shack for 40 cents and don't admit it, is already worth more than negative $39.60
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I've actually been involved in a study for a large consumer electronics firm and the benefits of standardisation are substantially larger than the profit that would be lost from no longer being able to sell chargers and related equipment. Just imagine: if chargers were as standard as batteries you could leave them out of the box giving you a huge saving on shelf space and transportation costs. Did you know that there are laws in Europe requiring consumer electronic firms to have to be able to replace power supplies for products that went out of production 7 years ago? There are warehouses with dozens of obsolete charges just lying around. Image the cost of that.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
They contracted an unfortunate STD and turned to alcohol.
And I've been involved in a small study that said "if it really costs them money to use all those different weird and wacky connectors like you say, why do they do it?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Two reasons, firstly the benefits are long term, the cost are short term. Adding a few dollars per device, when you sell several hundred million, seriously impacts your quarterly results. The benefits to consumers, the environment and the bottom line were clear and pretty certain. But it would take 3 to 5 years before the benefits outweighed the investment.
More importantly: firms that would not participate could essentially avoid the cost and then free ride later on. So the management said: let's try to free ride. In the end none of the consumer electronic firms involved (all the big ones) went ahead with it.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
Well it would be quite easy to find out. You could measure the incidence of cancer in lots of people of various ages now, and compare it against the incidence in people of the same ages in different periods in the past.
I'm surprised none of those so-called scientists thought of that. Can I have a Nobel prize now?
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Until you attempt to get everyone behind the idea of the few thousand "standard" connectors. That are all unique and different from today's non-standard connectors.
You can get pretty far with a handful of voltages and currents. Also, a high-current supply can safely deliver power to low-power devices, just not the other way around.
For example, increase length of the connector according to power. "Deep" (high-powered) adapters can be attached to "shallow" (low-powered) devices, but a low power adapter won't reach to power the high-powered device.
Since high-power devices also tend to be bigger, the issue of having a slightly longer adapter plug is not really an issue.
There is absolutely no need for "thousands" of standard connections if we had started with a sensible, standardized design.
Sir, He's standing next to my outside wall with his cell phone. Arrest him!
Sir, if he'd installed his Wired Power Equivalent Privacy properly this wouldn't have been a problem. My device connected automatically as I walked by!
When an officer of the law breaks the law they are no longer acting as an officer of the law and need to be dealt with a
from living under a high-tension line.
Transformers (not the Hasbro sort) are basically two adjacent coils, with the difference in the number of windings on each side determining the voltage step-up or step-down.
Here you have what is basically a transformer, just with the coils moved further away from each other. A 1:1 step ratio in a transformer is pretty efficient.
Transformer coils are coupled through a true magnetic core that is near-optimally shaped using flat iron plates. They are not equivalent to inductors that transmit through air, and the biggest difference is exactly what you are saying is insignificant - efficiency.
You're not wasting electricity spraying electrons in the air like a water sprinkler, there has to be a circuit before potential can be moved from one coil to the other.
Generating a magnetic field uses power, and the transmitting coil is a complete circuit. You are in fact spraying electromagnetic force around like a water sprinkler, though it's a bad analogy.
Electronics can keep idle current to a minimum. Where's the problem?
The minimum is zero. Electronics cannot make a magnetic field that consumes zero power, either in a transformer or some other inductor. You are flat wrong here.
Isn't this "wireless power" stuff just a terrible waste of energy?
Why yes, yes it is. Very perceptive of you. The Oil Gestapo is on its way to your house now.
I'm worried about the ecological consequences.
Lately i've been reading a lot about Nikola Tesla and Ionospheric heaters[HAARP] (which includes documentation on Tesla's wireless power invention and distribution system).
Regards to all the Dutchmen/women @ Slashdot.
This was a JOKE, people!
Or in one sound: WHOOOOSH!
Has everybody lost his humor?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What about about a damn bluetooth trackball already!?? But if Logitech ever does make a bluetooth trackball let me be the first to whine about it not having wireless power too!
I have a no-name laptop power adapter with swappable tips designed exactly in this way :
Each tip for each constructor pulls its power from the wire with the correct voltage.
One could easily imagine a standard multi voltage connector for electronic gizmo which carries everything needed as you describe.
(Just like the molex connector inside PC carries both +5v and +12v for drives) (Except that, then every couple of year, a new incompatible standard will probably arise (see the Sata power connector designed for +3v and hot-plugability).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
We've had a 12V standard connectors for 80 years, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar_lighter_receptacle#History and apart from recreational vehicles, it isn't happening.
The only DC power standard connector that has a chance is the USB's 5 Volts, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Power .
It's not much power (successive spec revisions seem to have pushed it up to ~ 7 Watts), which in a way is nice because it forces people to make more efficient gizmos (including humping dog flash drives, and tiny lights, etc. from http://usb.brando.com.hk/ ).
http://www.greenplug.us/ has a protocol to boost power delivery high enough to power TVs and such, based around USB.
The tipping point is when devices stop shipping with power adapters, and you just plug them in to the nearest USB hub. They say it's happened in China. Then you start migrating your USB hubs to solar power, your home treadmill, etc. and the power company isn't involved as it's all DC.
=S