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PowerBeam Demos Wireless Electricity At CES
JadedApprentice writes "Caught a mention of this startup yesterday on CNBC while they were reviewing the latest gadgets at CES. In the off chance that there was anything remotely feasible or safe about the wireless power prototypes PowerBeam had on display, I took a quick google and found this nice little write-up on the technology (along with some priceless comments for those that scroll down, and I'm not talking about those on the page below).
Bottom line: while it's possibly safe, it may not be efficient and it sure as hell won't power your 1200W gaming rig, the guys at PowerBeam are hoping the convenience of wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers will not only give you the coolest living room in town, but make them very rich in the process"
This may be the only one using lasers, but there's a fair gaggle of wireless power schemes on the floor at CES. Besides several chargers limited to charging the controllers of specific game consoles, I walked through a working high-concept demo put on by PowerMat (also mentioned in that PC Magazine article), which relies on dedicated per-device sleeves and dongles to power cameras, phones, and other necessary pocket-fillers; the sleeve-equipped devices then sit to charge on one of the PowerMat induction mats. That means that if your gizmo isn't one for which a sleeve or dongle is available, you're out of luck, unless it uses AA or AAA batteries (there's a charger made to fit on the mat) or can be powered by USB (for which the company has hockey-puck sized USB-power sources, which, Yes, sit on the induction mat). Impressive, but at $30 a pop, that would mean a fair outlay to convert many gadgets to use such a system.
IR lasers seem like a good way to power remotes and you can then have them use rechargeable batteries.
I thought we were supposed to be looking for ways to be more energy efficient, not ways to be less energy efficient?
This space available.
The quest for wireless electricity has been going on since the days of Tesla, and despite innumerable dollars spent on research and development, we have made precious little progress. Wireless electricity has again and again proved to be unfeasible, and ultimately, pointless. I've never understood why people are so eager to find a true wireless electricity system. While it is certainly an interesting novelty to impress people with, it has very little application in the real world. Most devices which are grounded to an outlet are often the kind of objects we don't lug about, like TVs, printers, or cable boxes. None of these devices will benefit from wireless electricity. For the rare device which is portable, but occasionally requires a power connection, like a laptop, the wire tends to be long enough and unobtrusive enough that wireless electricity is just not really an issue. I think it's safe to say with all the non-news we hear about wireless electricity ever year, I'll be using wireless electricity to power my Phantom console which will run Doom 3.
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I prefer to jive it up a bit:
JadedAppreentice writes "Caught a menshun of this hyar startup yessuhterday on CNBC while they were reviewin' th' latess gadgits at CES. In th' off chance thet thar was ennythin' remotely feasible o' safe about th' wireless power prototypes PowerBeam had on display, ah took a quick google an' foun' this hyar nice li'l write-up on th' technology (along wif some priceless comments fo' them thet scroll down, an' ah's not talkin' about them on th' page below). Bottom line: while it's postibly safe, it may not be efficient an' it sho'nuff as hell won't power yer 1200W gamin' rig, th' guys at PowerBeam is hopin' th' convenience of wireless power delivahed through direcked IR lasers will not only give yo' th' right fineess livin' room in town, but make them mighty rich in th' process" Nigga, please! This hyar may be th' only one usin' lasers, but thar's a fair gaggle of wireless power schemes on th' flore at CES. Besides sevahal chargers limited t'chargin' th' controllers of specific game cornsoles, ah walked through a wawkin' high-corncepp demo put on by PowerMat (also menshuned in thet PC Magazine article), which relies on dedicated per-device sleeves an' dongles t'power cameras, phones, an' other necessary pocket-fillers; th' sleeve-equipped devices then set to charge on one of th' PowerMat induckshun mats. Thet means thet eff'n yer gizmo ain't one fo' which a sleeve o' dongle is available, yer outta luck, unless it uses AA o' AAA batteries (thar's a charger made t'fit on th' mat) o' kin be powered by USB (fo' which th' compenny has hockey-puck sized USB-power sources, which, Yessuh, set on th' induckshun mat). Impressive, but at $30 a pop, thet'd mean a fair outlay t'convaht menny gadgits t'use sech a system, dawgone it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Wake me when I can just plug-and-play a toilet anywhere.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
So, what are the risks that I'll end up powering my retina, rather than my TV, with one of these fancy IR lasers? For very low wattage applications, this wouldn't be a huge deal, assuming the system has a cut-off when the beam is interrupted; but I would hate to have a laser powerful enough to keep a 100watt TV running(through a solar cell no less, efficiency is going to suck) in my eye for even a fraction of a second.
This system just seems impractical at any scale. For the dump-the-gadget-on-the-mat charging scenario, dealing with inductive inefficiencies is going to be easier than dealing with solar cell inefficiency and having to aim the laser at the gadget. For fixed stuff, you are going to have to align the laser and either have a backup battery, or just deal with the device shutting down, if somebody interrupts the beam. Getting wireless power than can follow a moving target around will mean fairly sophisticated tracking and targeting systems, and possibly multiple emitters.
how many power cords will this save? ZERO.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
How much RFI does this type of device cause ( Yes the IR won't) but ...
The guy next door trying to work a little DX from the south pacific , and gets creamed by the inadvertent radiation from such a device is
not going to be in a good mood. The "not good" mood could vary , from his giving up radio to burning down your house. Likely the response will be somewhere in between (like frying your electronics). It's surprising what a well directed kilowatt will do.
I've always thought that the first small step for wireless power should be in the form of a mouse pad. Plug your mouse pad in and let it power your mouse/cellphone/ipod/other small electronic device.
It was better 6 months ago, when it was called SplashPad.
wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers will ... give you the coolest living room in town
And the only one on fire, making it the hottest too!
Chuck Hobson's Tesla coil website (here) is an excellent source of technical theory on tesla coils. Chuck also has a page on the Marconi Centennial Spark Gap Transmitter.
Re Tesla himself I highly reading up on the great man that was Nikola Tesla - it is just a real shame that Tesla was basically ripped off by a well known business partner and ended up dying destitute.
How about a game controller that would grab the energy from movement. Totally possible with todays technology. Applies to the computer mouse also.
Feel free to patent the idea as a Finnish citizen it is too much of a hassle for me. I would like to have one, though.
The problem with power is that it's powerful.
The problem with wireless is that there's nothing to contain the information/power you are sending down it.
Thus, sending power over wireless is one of those things that ain't gonna catch on until someone REALLY comes up with a breakthrough... i.e. using some sort of technique that we didn't imagine or utilitising some counter-intuitive quantum principle or something. All the current methods (magnetic induction, pointing a "beam" of some kind) have extremely fatal flaws. At the moment, a 10p bit of copper not only ensures relatively efficient transmission over a much wider range of uses (analog/digital data and power, even simultaneously) but also makes sure it doesn't leak out anywhere and kill anyone by covering it in a millimetre-thick bit of plastic.
A wireless "beam" system is inherently susceptible to obstacles which, we assume, must recieve the power in absence of its intended target. So the power either has to be very low to be safe, or it has to be in a form that won't affect *anything* in its path. I don't think lasers could be said to "not affect things in their path", so it has to be very low power to be safe (what's the safe wattage for a laser in your eye? We're talking 1mW or something). Now, you can get "fancy" without thinking too much - a wider beam, which spreads the power over a small area which has to be beamed to the device etc. but all you're doing is adding more complexity, bulk, components, etc. and reducing convenience.
Magnetic induction is one of those things where the energy is relatively safe (magnetic fields) and, unfortunately, low-power and non-discriminatory about its dissipation - the stuff leaks in all directions wasting more of its (already quite low) power, in 3 dimensions which means that you're now getting useful output power proportional to the inverse cube of your input. If you scale up to larger-power fields you start intefering with other things - inducing currents in nearby metals, playing hell with magnetic devices, wiping credit cards etc. About the only practical use is short-range, low-power devices with their own power store (batteries). You won't be able to use this for anything serious yet and you're coming up with a marvellously complicated replacement for a 10p bit of cable and a mains transformer.
This is one of those problems that we'll bodge solutions to for the next fifty years and then, at some point, discover some fantastic bit of physics that lets us transport large amounts of energy from one place to another without affecting anything en route. The entire principle will be so brilliant that we'll instantly start ditching wired power overnight (probably before we know that it's completely safe). Until then, this "invention" will be consigned to the gimmick / pound shop / toy market and not actually do anything really useful.
Stop faffing about by using stuff that's sitting on a shelf in your inventor's shed to move energy from one place to another. We can do it already, in a myriad of quite obvious (and inefficient, useless) ways but the implicit problem is that the energy we "move" affects things in its path, or is affected by things in its path, to such a degree that it's not viable to use or invest in... until that problem is solved wireless power will not move on.
We did the same with computer data - first it was consigned to copper. Then lots of people came up with lots of fancy ways to try to use it without copper (infrared, microwave, radio, etc.). People were building RS232-Infrared gadgets in their workrooms. It wasn't until there was a fairly reliable, non-line-of-sight, large-enough-range, power-efficient-enough, wide-enough-bandwidth way to do so that people actually starting taking wireless ethernet/bluetooth/etc. seriously.
The rule of thumb I'd use is: Can you do it on a large scale and be useful to the big players? If not, it's pointless trying. This was true of solar - there were specialised uses that could pump investment money into i
Okay, let's do the math. To power my laptop takes about 30 watts. The best infrared detectors are about 30% efficient. So they'd have to beam about 100 watts to the detector. 100 watts hitting one square centimeter of cloth or plastic or paper is enough to start a fire. And way more than enough to blow out an eyeball in a millisecond.
This is where some group (like the IEEE) needs to come together and develop a reasonable standard that is cheap & effective enough to power small devices like phones & slowly recharge others like laptops.
And it's security has already been cracked. People are ready to get free energy.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You must be new here.
No, I be new here!
I got some bad grammar
Oh, excuse me.
I was loitering in the electron beam.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
The whole notion of usable wireless electricity smells to me of perpetual motion.
wonder who is going to fire up Wardenclyffe tower now.
Tesla would be pleased.
Wireless Extension Cords!
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
So for $30 you can put an energy-stealing pad in between your USB-powered charger and the wall plug, instead of just getting a $5.00 USB charging dongle.
This just doesn't make any kind of sense at all.
Let's think about this for a second. Assume that you want to power a device which draws 200mA at 5V (a number that's the right order of magnitude for small consumer electronics like an iPod). That works out to one watt of power draw.
For the purposes of this calculation, we'll make some extremely generous assumptions:
1) The device has a 100% efficient switching converter and can utilize all of the power it receives.
2) The device's solar cells are 50% efficient, something which has not been attained even in a laboratory.
3) There are no laser transmission losses in the air.
Even under these completely impossible conditions, that would still require a 2-watt laser. For the record, that is four times stronger than a class-3B laser, and those commonly require protective eye-wear to use in the workplace. A 2-watt laser could burn your walls, your skin, or really pretty much anything it wanted.
The only way I would even _consider_ using lasers for powering anything in my home would be if they were:
1) organized in a grid so that the total output power was spread over a couple of square inches instead of a point charge.
2) The emitter had a straight beam pattern with minimal diffusion.
3) The emitter had an auto shut-off that engaged any time one of a ring of surrounding IR beams were broken. These beams would have to be far enough away from the emitter that the emitter would be able to shut off in-between the time something could break the beams and the time that thing could enter the emitter's path.
4) The two devices sat next to each other instead of being across the room. I would not be willing to target high-energy lasers all the way across my living room, but I might be willing to put down a phone with a solar panel on it immediately next to an emitter.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
..wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers..
a copypasta gnna troll at 1 informative?
Come on mods, have the trolls got mod points now too? Or are they just that stupid that they'll mod up anything that praises apple in the header?
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
Just put the power receiving sensor on the end of a "safety" cord and move it way up towards the ceiling, so that it is out of the line of sight!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I'm pretty sure I've seen a video of an IR laser lighting a piece of paper on fire. What's the point of wireless connections like that if you can't walk through them without bursting into flames? You might as well just use a cable. As for what they say about wirelessly charging batteries, well I'd rather see batteries that can flash charge in like 15 seconds. That'd be sweet even if it's wired, which of course it would be. It'd probably take longer to charge the capacitor than the battery too but hey, it'd be awesome! It's not that hard to get 1AH or less of energy from a wall outlet either using some relatively cheap equipment.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
What about power transmission? I have read that the major downside of powerplants being too far away from towns is that they lose 'energy' from the cables. (i know, very technical language)
What's the point of wireless connections like that if you can walk through them without bursting into flames?
I find it better this way
Don't forget the pyramids where power distributors, and if it was good enough for the ancient Egyptians it's good enough for us!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Whats about in a larger scale, I mean what about a laser beam send from Mercury directly to earth, even with all the interferences an the rotations from mercury him self and the Venus you can surely produce enough energy for earth, at least till something goes horrible wrong and we destroy our own planet with the beam.... -I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.-
I'm the Mayor of Hiroshinma, you insensitive crod!
blah. moz logged me out. will be funny in 20 years when everyone is permanently sun tanned from all the wireless power in the air.
~DF
There is a nifty-gadget aspect of placing devices on a table and having them charge auto-magically, but for the most part wireless power is a waste.
Nifty, gadgety, and USEFUL. Charging is not the only option here.
12:50 - press return.
Free energy suppression
No, they're not free. Do you know you'd have to dance continuously to the energy god to get the Free Energy? Too impractical.
You can get far higher returns converting brainwaves into energy.
The human body also generates roughly 8000 BTU per day, a far better source of energy.
Any laser with more than a few mW is very dangerous to the eye. It's possible to try and make it safe via feedback (you put a small laser on the device that needs to beam at the power laser in order to turn on the power), but, geez, is that really worth it?
A much bigger gain at this point would be standardization three power standards: USB power for low power devices, FireWire power for intermediate power devices, and a single high voltage and high power standard (say 24V). Plus, devices and power supplies should be smart enough to deal with power supplies that don't give full wattage.
They're called "cards", and "ping pong", and "pool", and "Monopoly", and "Wet T-shirt Contests", and...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"