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Wireless Power Group Sees Standard Within 6 Months
alphadogg writes "The group developing a standard for wireless charging expects to complete its first specification within six months, opening the door for makers of cell phones, digital cameras and other devices to bring compatible products to market. Wireless charging lets consumers place gadgets on a mat that plugs into a wall outlet, and have the devices recharge automatically without needing to plug in each one. Apart from the gee-whiz factor, it's supposed to make life more convenient by letting people walk into their home or office, toss their gadgets onto a mat to recharge and forget about them."
Charging mats will recognize when a device is fully charged and then consume a trickle of energy in standby mode
Okay thats interesting. We all use wireless (inductive) power in other places and while, yeah, the cheap plugpack segment is mostly switchmode now I wonder if there are places where the efficency of transformers could be improved with a digital back channel which says send me this much power.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Great, another place where my phone can be stolen.
We've tried doing this with physical plugs to no avail, even if one half conforms to a standard there will always be a few very popular device manufacturers -cough- Apple -cough- who will break the trend and inconvenience a large amount of users.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well, unless the baby implements the correct handshaking protocol with the controller there shouldn't be a problem. And as for metal, I'm assuming that the standard (or decent implementations of it) will deal with what to do in the event the mat detects that its deriving an unknown load (shorted loop, etc.).
Have gnu, will travel.
You could put the baby beside a phone or camera which requests power, but even then its only five watts which is not going to do any damage.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The article mentions "The standard is for delivering up to 5 watts of power, which covers most smaller devices. "
This sounds like a pretty low limit to me. My iPhone charger delivers 5 watts and it takes hours before it's charged. Now imagine you buy one of those matts and your family or colleagues throw their phones on the matt as well. At the end of the day, they might not even be charged!
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I don't really see the point. As long as you have to put the device in a specific location anyway, I don't see that it's much of an improvement over having to connect it with your charger. You have to connect it with a location just the same, with this new tech, just the plug is different (a pad vs a plug).
Wake me when you have a tech that charges my mobile from the moment I step in my home door and leave my mobile in my jacket pocket hanging in the foyer.
Until that use case can be satisfied, I think this is just the same-old, same-old.
Depending on the circumstances 5 watts is more than enough to kill someone.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
And how do I charge it when I'm somewhere else?
Oh. Use a plug-in charger? Um... So, what's the point here?
How about standardizing on a USB charging interface?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
With all the /. users saying "this is going to be pointless," and "it's already easy enough as it is," this is sure to be a hit.
Consumers will know which products are compliant because they'll carry the consortium's "Qi" logo (pronounced "chee" after the Chinese for life force).
Or maybe it'll be the char (U+6C7D) pronounced "qi4", meaning "vapor, gas, steam". ;-)
One online dictionary has 106 Chinese characters pronounced "qi" in Mandarin, with all of the possible tones. Their logo is just a stylized form of the two letters "qi", it could mean any of them. So we could make a lot of jokes about the true meaning of their use of this Chinese syllable.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Its an option for the palm pre as well.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yeah but that ignores inductive coupling. I suppose there might be warnings for people with pacemakers around these things but they already get exposed to that much power from AC fields around big transformers, etc.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You could put the baby beside a phone or camera
No damage to the baby, but that phone/camera is toast as soon as you turn your head :)
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Besides seeming to be not much of big deal convenience-wise, is this a "green" technology or is it a power leach drawing power even when it's not being used. What is the ratio of input power to power actually charging a device?
Back in the late 50s, I ran a several turn loop around my bedroom and created a "Halo coil" with many turns on a set of monaural headphones so I could have cordless headphones for listening to my shortwave radio. It worked, but wasn't particularly efficient.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Think about the power needed to keep mobile phones loaded with applications working though the day. It would be okay if you could be stuffed plugging it into USB whenever you sat down but thats too hard. But if you can drop it on to a charging pad from time to time the battery need never go down.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why do they have to keep using 2 letter acronyms for everything?
How about you learn what an acronym is. First and foremost it is an abbreviation. If you can't expand it, it's not an abbreviation, and thus not a pronounceable abbreviation: it's just a short trademark.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
If something like that will happen, I can imagine neighborhood teenagers suspiciously lounging about near your place. Because their newest cell phones will be recharged for free :)
Of course you can lock down "over the air" emissions by shielding that room... but it means your cell, while charging, won't be able to receive/place calls. Which would require a femtocell inside that charging room, which makes it all even more expensive.
So... please pull your gadgets out of the pocket and put them on the mat for now. :)
Thanks
Hyperom.com
This will be a huge boon to me.. One of my hobbies is underwater photography, and as anyone who does that will testify, you always have a nervous moment when you immerse the camera and housing at the start of a dive..
This is because you have to seal the camera in a housing, sealed by a multitude of o-rings, each of which need to be cleaned and re-greased every time you open the housing. When you put the o-rings back in place, you have to look carefully for a hair, or a speck of grit or dirt, or anything that could compromise the seal in any way. If you mess up (even a single hair can cause a seal failure), you'll have a lovely view of rising water in your camera housing, and you camera will be so much junk (and you may kill the electronics in the housing too, which is expensive as well!)..
This can really put a crimp in a holiday (no more photography for you! And you did have it insured, didn't you??)..
There are really only two common reasons to crack a housing open.. To take the memory card out and back it up, and to recharge the camera/strobe batteries after a dive..
As you need to recharge after most dives, nobody's really bothered much with wireless data transmission, but if you can wirelessly recharge, it's simple to add wireless data transfer too, so you'll not have to crack the case 'till you want to change the lens (which isn't too common most of the time) or strip it for cleaning (you could probably get away with once or twice a holiday, if that).. Much safer!
You guys do realize that there was a fellow named Tesla that did some really ground breaking work on this originally, right?
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
How efficient are these matts? Last I heard they were only 50% efficient. Does that mean that if I leave this thing plugged in all the time, it's "waisting" energy?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
How is 5 volts able to kill someone. I read the article from your link. And it states that 30V is the threshold over which somebody could get killed in very unfavorable conditions, among other the current would have to be AC 50/60 Hz. I expect this wireless mat to deliver 5 W DC.
Do babies come with Induction coils?
Quote TFA:
"The standard is for a technology called magnetic induction, in which power is transferred between metal coils built into the device and the charging mat when they are placed close to each other. "
Its just a magnetic field folks.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
LOL, and true.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The character for "vapor, gas, steam" is the character they are referring to. The life force used in traditional Chinese medicine is another meaning for that same character.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Do babies come with Induction coils?
A few.
A guy I worked with his son had broken the antenna on his implant in the playground at school. They could get it working by squeezing his head in just the right way to close the break in the antenna wire.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
30V through skin, 5V or probably even less otherwise. There was a moron (AFAIR, a soldier in training) who killed himself using a 9V battery-powered ohmmeter by sticking the pointed probes into his thumbs, through the skin. You see, blood is an electrolyte, it conducts electricity quite nicely, and the shortest path from one hand to the other using blood as a conductor is through the heart...
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
If the public is already afraid of living near power lines (100yds away), what makes these manufacturers think that having a bunch of 'wireless power pads' is going to be any different? Or is this a case of a rabid chihuahua is no threat due to its size?
... but every time they call each other, the calls go straight to voice mail, as if the phones are never turned on. weird.
5W internally can kill, but the likelihood of accidentally generating 5W internally from a 5W induction mat is below negligible. Keep in mind they use much more powerful induction mats (aka induction stoves) at chain restaurants like Boston Pizza, where the intelligence of the cooks can rival infants.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
It will be much easier to make a device more rugged (also mobile phones looking otherwise quite stylish; check Nokia 3720 classic) if it doesn't need to have any plugs.
This for power, Bluetooth/etc. for connectivity.
One that hath name thou can not otter
That sounds awfully inconvenient if you're trying to take a call. Perhaps instead of having one large mat that all the phones have to lie on top of, you could split it up into smaller inductors, put a layer of velco on each, and wire them to extend up to 3 feet from the central hub. Your cell, of course, would have a corresponding velcro patch, and if you needed to make a call, you just pick it up and call, without having to worry about running out of power on a quarter-charge.
I think we could call it a "tetherphone."
Right, because everybody I know spends all day in an electricity substation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hmmm ... I'd think that most techies would immediately think "vaporware".
In English, this doesn't work too well as a metaphor for "life force" (whatever that may be). We get our life force by ingesting "lesser" life forms that supply us with the carbohydrates, amino acids, plus the trace minerals and vitamins that we need to maintain our vitality. We do need oxygen, but we don't usually call it "vapor".
Maybe they really meant the logo to refer to vaporware. Ya think?
Actually, I was assuming they meant the U+6C14 character, which is the right (phonetic) component of the U+6C7D char that I mentioned. It's also qi4, but it has a wider range of meanings. Not surprising as it's standard radical #84, and they're usually vague, general things. "Vital breath" is among the basic meanings, along with "smell", "weather", and "to get/make angry".
There are also qi2 chars that mean "water chestnut", "green frog" and "piebald horse"; I was sorta hoping that they meant one of those. ;-)
There's a lot of silliness in the attempts to borrow Chinese words without actually learning anything about how the language works. And Mandarin has so many homonyms to have fun with, especially if you drop the tones ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This is an urban legend, btw. Usually it's a Navy sailor in the tale.
The same kind of magnetic field that is also generated by power lines, and would be the cause of any problems associated with them, assuming said problems exist.
Static magnetic fields are fine (the earth has one naturally), but changing ones could be dangerous due to the induction, which is the exact reason they're being used here (to induce a current).
There's been some research done on power lines, although I couldn't really say whether or not the fields from a wireless charging device. On one hand you have a lower current (and therefore weaker field), but on the other you are much closer to it (field strength is inversely proportional to the square of the radius).
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I wouldn't put it past us Navy folk. A guy in my A School class tried to megger between his nipples.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
the fact that this process inevitably will cost more energy than plugging the device is seems unimportant...
Privacy is terrorism.
I wouldn't put it past us Navy folk. A guy in my A School class tried to megger between his nipples.
A megger does have much more voltage than a simple ohmmeter. Most units I've seen had pretty low currents, but you could still give yourself a nice shock.
And for us slightly less serious underwater photographers, I can imagine a nice little point-and-shoot cast in a solid block of polycarbonate. No gaskets at all-- no leaks until crush depth and catastrophic failure.
Somebody else pointed out in this article that you don't want to overuse the connectors on phones because they do eventually break. I charge my phone once a day for this reason. Thats all it is.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I keep wondering what the real benefit of wireless power is for the gadget community in general. Wireless power is going to be less efficient than wired power because of simple physics. If all of these devices are now designed so that they get power over the air, then we are further wasting electricity.
I did see the mention of underwater devices that have to be completely sealed, and avoiding breaking that seal makes some sense, but for general devices that are used in the air, I see it all as a big waste of energy for a small offset in convenience. IT would be better to develop a surface mount magnetic connection that was as universal as USB. (and accepted, similar to the new cell phone charging standards)
I mean, seriously, how hard is it to come up with a standard for this?
I'll take a stab:
5 Ghz, keep power below the FCC limit for uncontrolled emission at at (1 meter or less).
Was that so hard, really?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Last I checked, 5 milliwatts per square centimeter was the maxiumum acceptable RF exposure limit.
OK does any one else see this as completely nuts?
At the moment the power output is relatively low. 5 watts ish. Lets think about this. This is BROADCAST POWER. It's going to leak into everything around it. There will be no such thing as 95% efficient transfer of power. So where does this residual power go. Well into everything around it. The closer something is the more it will receive.
Very simple chemistry here. Entropy increase with energy. Entropy can simple be defined as the desire of a substance to reach it most random and natural state. ( There is probably a more accurate definition than that. ) AKA Entropy is all about things BREAKING DOWN. So if we add energy to a "thing" it ultimately will break down faster.
I'm sorry but I don't want to be walking around in yet more energy radiation fields. Especially one designed to transmit POWER AKA ENERGY.
5 watts gives way to 10 watts gives away to 25 watts gives away to stupid amounts of power. As "improvements" and legislation allow higher and higher output.
This also strikes me as the most un-green tech out there. Simply a device that radiates POWER.
I'd prefer mini-USB, but the crappy awkward micro-USB seems to be taking over. Oh, well... I'll be rid of it when the next "standard" comes out in a couple years.
It should be easy enough to add a sealed USB socket to the case. So you connect the USB port on the cammera to a lead which runs to the USB socket. This socket can have a waterproof cover which you remove when you want to connect to your PC/charger. It would be easy to seal the USB socket cover, as it can be round and screwed down with O-ring seals. This could be done with todays cameras - if they allowed you to charge the battery via the USB connection. You could also test the seals on the case before diving. You would need a chamber large enough to contain the camera in its case. Pressurize the chamber and watch a pressure gauge inside the case - if the gauge does not rise then you have a good seal. So what you want is a case manufacturer to build a housing with an external power/usb connector. The power could be used to charge batteries in the housing which drive any electronics in the housing, and also provide power to the camera (via its DC connector) and any strobe lights. The housing would also have a built-in pressure gauge for testing. This would probably be cheaper than buying a new camera, and could be applied to any existing camera.
Ooooohhhhhh. Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.
I know this is a late response, but I didn't see it in the children comments:
USB is capable of delivering 5V at 1A, or 5W of power, per port in its maximum configuration. This is likely where the spec came from, since most manufacturers are moving towards the mini-usb as a power source. By providing the current standard limit, most device designs will already conform downstream of the induction coil. They've simply designed to the marketplace.
What they didn't necessarily consider is that it would be great if we could get 10-20W out of a charger to get this !@#$% charged a little faster. Especially things like phones, which can take a significant fraction of that 5W to operate under heavy use conditions.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
High end cameras (the kind you'd be really worried about) generally have separate battery packs that recharge on a conditioning charger. They don't charge in-camera because no professional in their right mind is going to dock their camera for any length of time - they swap and go. There are options for studio photogs that will continuously power the cameras, but studio and underwater really aren't overlapping.
Interestingly, the housings already cost as much as (or more than) the camera itself. I just picked up a Nikon D3 on the used market for $2500 (offically for work), and the housings for them are north of $3-4k (a new D3s is $5300). I'll be sticking with my Fuji F30 and housing for holiday snaps of the fishes!
FWIW, a pressure gauge might not be terribly useful without a pretty heavy duty test rig. You can't test for external pressure without putting the housing in a second housing. You don't want to test in reverse (not all o-ring seals are reversable, it's based on groove geometry), and even if you were foolish enough to pull a vacuum on the casing it would still only be one atmosphere - which is likely 25-35% of the pressure differential on a "normal" dive.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And Mandarin has so many homonyms to have fun with, especially if you drop the tones ...
Just ask CHAO Yuen Ren.
Yeah, they would have to be using U+6C14. I guess that character doesn't really mean steam or vapor. I knew it meant air, and assumed it meant those also. Duibuqi.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
If you can use SDHC cards, you can get easy wireless data xfer with an EyeFi card. I didn't believe in them 'till I got one. Now I'm never going back.