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Wireless Charging Start-Up Claims 30-Foot Radius
Lucas123 writes "At Disrupt this week, Ossia Inc. demonstrated for the first time its wireless charging technology that founder Hatem Zeine said has a 30-foot radius and, like WiFi, can charge through walls and 'around corners.' The technology, still in prototype phase, uses the same spectrum as other wireless standards, such as WiFi and Bluetooth. The Cota wireless charging system includes a charger and a receiver — either a dongle device or chip-tech integrated into a product, such as a smartphone or battery. While it has yet to be miniaturized, Zeine said the wireless technology will eventually be small enough to fit into a AAA battery or any portable electronic device. While the technology has wider industrial implications, as a consumer product, a charging unit will likely sell for around $100, he said."
Is it just me or does this seem like a really bad idea?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
If you're blasting ~2.4ghz RF from one place to another, what happens when something absorptive gets in the way? If it can charge a smart phone, is it enough energy to burn you if you get in the way, or start a fire if it happens to be going through a nail in your wall?
How in the world are they going to push out significant amounts of power on bands with extremely strict transmission limits? It's going to take you all year to charge a AA battery from a 4000mW omnidirectional transmitter that's 10 meters away. Not to mention utterly destroying wifi and bluetooth signals for several hundred feet.
I read the internet for the articles.
without beamforming - inverse square law says no
with beamforming, one must remember that beamforming cannot focus in just one place, smaller but still constructive maxima will exist elsewhere. what wants 1/3 of a watt focused on their gonads accidentally?
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
The tinfoil hat crowd is going to go ballistic when this technology becomes ubiquitous. I can't wait. I'm already thinking of witty one-liners.
I seem to recall the M5 using wireless charging over distance with disastrous results...
He attached a cube to an iphone, held it in the air, and it started charging. We have to go by faith that there are no batteries in the cube. Sorry but this sounds like snake oil.
There's no way to pump enough energy into an EM field so that it can:
1. Charge another electronic device
2. Be limited to 30' in non-interfering range
This is typical of startups that wish to acquire a big injection of capital to keep going. They are entirely vapourware and none of their technology claims stand up to even the most basic scrutiny.
Normally I would suggest that the government regulate the liars that operate these kinds of startups. But it's mostly just rich people getting ripped off, so I don't care so much.
Can't remember the science behind it, saw it on an A&E biography show about this life long time ago.
"It's like your Wi-Fi signal. If you can get a Wi-Fi signal, you'll be able to get power."
Yes, but now we can't get Wi-Fi signal.
Also, how often is the "beacon" signal refreshed? Do I need to stand perfectly still while my device is recharging? Why is my skin peeling?
This man has what the people wants.
...and with my new pacemaker, I feel like a new.. AAaaaargh....ZzRK***POP***sizzle***pop*** NGGGGGGGGGGah....
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
So how do you stop leakage and vampires?
You can't really encrypt a power signal.
No. At least not in this implementation.
From the article:
"Cota is inherently safe, as safe as your Wi-Fi hub," Zeine said. "A Cota-enabled device sends out a beacon signal that finds paths to the charger, which in turn returns the power signal through only those open paths back to the receiver, avoiding people or anything that absorbs its energy."
Ok, so it has a two-way connection between the "transmitter" and "receiver". It wouldn't be hard to modulate the energy output levels from both devices to encode data, both directions, all operating in the same spectra that our most ubiquitous communications devices also happen to use.
Again, from the article:
"...Starbucks coffee shops, for example, use Powermat technology to allow patrons to charge properly equipped smartphones and tablets on tabletops."
And...
""Just think, this could forever eliminate that annoying chirp from the mystery smoke detector with a dying battery at 3:00 in the morning," Zeine said." (my emphasis!...lol. I can't believe he actually said that.)
Think about the implications for a moment.
It says it can deliver up to 1 watt. Most modern smart phones need 5-10 watts to charge at the full charging rate. 1 watt is going to be trickle charging and probably not enough to actually charge it at all if you are actually using it. Sure it might be a nice way to keep your phone relatively topped off while you are around the house but if you come home from work with a drained batter you are still going to want to plug it in or at least use a contact charging system.
It is also about 10% efficient so that 1 watt of power transmitted to your phone is 10 watts being used up by the wireless transmitter.
The transmitter is also going to be huge "bout the size of a large tower PC once consumerized" and "but it appeared to be a pillar-shaped piece of equipment that's about 6 feet tall."
My friend's father is part of the team that developed this. It's safe (according to him).
...my testicles.
next invention, faraday cage underpants...
Why transmit the energy? Researchers in Germany have solved Tesla's quest for energy straight from our surroundings (albeit at at an extremely low voltage/amperage), and the discovery of graphene has led to batteries that charge themselves using ambient heat. Seems to me it would be smarter to pull what's naturally there rather than transmit radiation through your house.
I bet somewhere out there hovering in a spacecraft in the next dimension, a couple of aliens were having beers together and one said to the other "I bet you 1 million astro-bucks these humans are stupid enough to be tricked into microwaving themselves to death". And sure enough, the saucer people started Ossia and are now marketing and preparing their doomsday devices for mass distribution. Yes, collectively, we're dumb enough people. Its happening. Its bad enough with all the wifi, cell, bluetooth, and other such radio waves, but this is the big kahuna that proves we're all .......just .....plain....stupid.
The reason microwave ovens operate at 2.4 GHz is that it's the resonant frequency for H2O. Water absorbs energy best at that frequency.
So... we have a high power transmitter at 2.4 GHz... what could possibly go wrong.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
That is all.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
note to self, keep my nads more than 30 feet from these things
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Nikola Tesla demonstrated a 100 Watt light bulb being lit 92 miles away from his Colorado Springs lab about 100 years ago.
30 feet?
Ha!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Remember the story "Waldo" by Heinlein
I don't think wireless power is a good idea.
Speaking of Waldo (and Magic, Inc) , Baen will be publishing it in ebook form April 2014. Buy it by March 15th to get it at the bundle price, also in the april bungle is Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber and Eric Flint and Upon a Sea of Stars by A. Bertram Chandler
I'd love to be working at UL or a similar company and have something like this cross my desk. The potential for abuse sounds like fun. I'd make it a personal quest to find out how to make this fail in epic ways.
Grandma, why is your hair clip sparki... OMG GRANDMA!!!
The best thing about it is that it also works as a microwave oven and a tanning booth!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Sounds pretty ridiculous.
If he's picking up one watt with an antenna that's 3 inches on a side, that means he's pumping out much more than 16 watts per square foot. It only takes a fraction of that to create cataracts. Plus I doubt if the FCC is going to let anybody pump out 16 watts times say 500 to cover a 10 x 50 foot area.
Can they be used to keep my dinner hot while it sits on the counter while the waitress is jabbering on her cell phone?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Make the receiver the size of AA batteries. Then throw out all batteries for low-use devices that don't travel. Kids games, wireless remotes, and all sorts of things all being run on wireless power, never needing a battery again would be a great thing for the environemnt. You'd buy batteries for portable radios and flashlights only. The infinitely rechargeable batteries.
Learn to love Alaska
I'll bet this is going to whistle right through FCC approval.
Not.
Water has no resonant frequency anywhere near 2.4 GHz. There is nothing special about that frequency, other than being designated as a "junk band" for applications like heating.
The physics of this just can't work.
His 30 foot radius = 60 foot diameter sphere the power is broadcast to.
If you can pick up enough power on the surface of that 60 foot diameter sphere to replace a AAA battery, it would be a death ray at close range.
> The reason microwave ovens operate at 2.4 GHz is that it's the resonant frequency for H2O. Water absorbs energy best at that frequency.
This is a common fallacy. Food containing water absorbs microwaves (of all frequencies) because it is conductive.
Certain materials might just get zapped a bit. Seems like this could be kind of like putting Grandpa in the microwave on low...
there are evidences of plants under WIFI frequency bombardments having retarded growth
Links or it didn't happen.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Will it erase all the floppy disks and audio tapes in the house?
I dug up what looks to be the main patent for the technology from 2008:
I don't know enough about antennas and E&M to evaluate that. Any help here? According to the articles it gets ~10% efficiency at 10 feet and receives (?) 1 watt at 30 feet.
On to the possible crank warning signs: ... computational linguistics"). No graduate degree or research career.
* According to his LinkedIn profile, he's spent his whole career being a CEO and/or (later) doing software testing at Microsoft.
* He's identified as a physicist, but all he has to show for it is a bachelor's in physics from the University of Manchester (where he also "studied
* Twenty years after he gets his degree, having done nothing but software, he's suddenly producing miraculous hardware based on cutting-edge physics?
* Charger is hidden behind a curtain during a demo.
* Charger is six feet tall, but they're going to consumerize it to the size of a desktop PC in two years, when it will cost ~$100.
* Replacing all their off-the-shelf hardware with custom-built optimized hardware? No problem!
* Current fridge-sized charger has 200 transmitters, but when consumerized will have "20,000 transmitters in an 18-inch cube".
* The only public demo makes an iPhone declare itself to be charging. No electrical test equipment or data shown. No real evidence that it does anything.
* Claims the power goes through walls just like Wi-Fi, even though Wi-Fi signal strength can drop by orders of magnitude when it goes through walls.
* Charger only gets 10% efficiency from 10 feet away in open air, but this is never mentioned as an obstacle. Come to think of it, no technical obstacles are mentioned at all.
* This:
I don't know, maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. Maybe he's been doing physics and electronics as hobbies all this time, actually did come up with a workable idea, and used his management experience to drive the development of a real product. Maybe they really will have a commercialized version ready in a couple months and I'll have to eat crow. I just can't help but feel skeptical of people who announce their world-changing new product before it actually is a product.
Visit the
Links or it didn't happen.
'Cause the Internet never lies!
It may not be technically the resonant frequency of water, but there is something special about it:
The 2.45 GHz is a kind of useful average frequency. If the frequency was much higher then the waves would penetrate less well, lower frequencies would penetrate better but are absorbed only weakly and so once again the food would not absorb enough energy to cook well.
My understanding is that the 2.4Ghz band was assigned for unlicensed use because it was already cluttered with things like microwave ovens and was, therefore, undesirable for licensed use.
At the 2.4Ghz level would it fry wifi devices? All antennas absorb some amount of power from their signal but I don't know if it's a "use what I need" or "use everything I can get" type of relation.
Chemo-sabi.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
there are evidences of plants under WIFI frequency bombardments having retarded growth
Links or it didn't happen
Links, with pictures
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/05/can-wifi-signals-stunt-plant-growth/
http://www.mnn.com/health/healthy-spaces/blogs/student-science-experiment-finds-plants-wont-grow-near-wi-fi-router
Now, satisfied ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
touts advantages of cylindrically shaped buildings.
Even if this technology works reliably, on which I have my doubts, (not to mention the potential health risks if this thing accidentally irradiates someone by mis-aiming its EM beam), did anyone there stop to consider the efficiency of sending power through EM bursts at receivers through 30 feet of air, plus a wall or three? Can you imagine just how much energy is wasted through dissipation? We don't need less efficient means of transporting electricity. Anybody who uses this thing is going to use 3 - 10 times more electricity to charge their devices than just using a cable. (Numbers pulled from a remote inspiration device 30 feet away, but the actual amount of loss is somewhat irrelevant; the inverse square law guarantees it will be substantial.)
It's a bad sign when I'm the one pointing out the environmental dangers of new tech.
Wifi operates with radio waves. Do you have any idea how much radiowave, microwave, infrared, and ultraviolet radiation we are bombarded with every day? Or any idea that of those listed, none are ionizing (upper end of ultraviolet is, but is absorbed by atmosphere), and of those, only ultraviolet is more energetic than visible spectrum?
The only damage that we are aware of a cause for-- or aware of symptoms for-- is thermal damage if you were to jack the power up high enough to start cooking flesh. Absent both a known cause and any known incidents, there is zero reason to claim that wifi can cause damage.
MMMmmm. Sausage links.
Do slowly frying people smell like bacon cooking?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's 5.8 GHz... nothing absorbs that!
REALLY ??
You mean this 5.8 GHz since it's un-absorb-able, will propagate, like, forever ???
Somebody please nominate this guy for the 2014 ignoble prize award.
This might surprise you, but there is a difference between radio waves of a given frequency used to transmit information, and those used to deliver substantial amounts of energy, suitable for, say, charging a phone. ,,Watt''.
Said difference is measured in
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
We're talking about high enough intensity here to transmit 1 watt to an antenna that's about 44.5mm long. It's effective receiving area is limited because it has to be omnidirectional (due to size and use case). So it has an effective receiving area on the order or .0025 square meters of the 1200 odd square meters of area at 10 meters range from the power transmitter. Consequently, the transmitter must be putting out something like 1W * 1200m2 / .0025m2 = 480kW. Implausible. Has that cube the douchebag was showing off been inspected to see if it has a battery in it?
Or maybe they're a little smarter than that and they have an array of power transmitting antennas that turn up the heat when they get a return signal from the charger device. That could get your power losses down by a factor of maybe 100. So you'd be only burning maybe 5kW to charge a 1W device...
Holy Jesus! Why don't they just set a major coal bed on fire and bypass the middleman?
No there's not. You just need about about 10 billion times more power.
"Cota is inherently safe, as safe as your Wi-Fi hub," Zeine said. "A Cota-enabled device sends out a beacon signal that finds paths to the charger, which in turn returns the power signal through only those open paths back to the receiver, avoiding people or anything that absorbs its energy."
If I'm reading that at all correctly, this is using beamformed RF, especially since it must work in the Far field. Not much near field in this frequency range. And getting a watt of charging power in the far field needs beamforming or what the boys down at the shop call "A shitload of power."
So this device on your phone apparently"asks" for power. Then the main station sends it to the device. The miracle part is that the formed beam supposedly misses people, goes around corners, and performs other really sexy heretofore unknown RF majick.
Umm, how is this RF power going to "miss you" if you are using the phone?
Also, if you are using it and moving around the house, is it going to continuously follow you?
What if you have multiple devices in different parts of the house?
What if you are 31 feet away?
What if you leave the house? Going to have two different charging systems?
So much better to use a near field induction system if you really really have to have cordless charging. At least you'll remember where you put the phone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ask my "French Model Boyfriend"!
The modern near field charges basically prove this wrong. You don't need to radiate that much power to get your battery to absorb 1W. You can get the radiator to absorb the energy it radiated if nothing else absorbed it, meaning the field strength can far exceed the input power. In the end your device is better modeled as an air core transformer, the primary's input power is dependent on the secondary's output, if nothing is connected the transformer consumes negligible power.
With that said, trying to make that work at 30 feet is hard, and I tend to think that the frequencies required will mean that you will get serious EMI like issues when your system designed to transfer 1W into a AA accidently transfers 10W into the AC power lines, or it transfers 1W into the poorly shielded HDMI cable on your TV, etc.
This is pretty awesome, but do I really need it? Yeah, the generic charging pad is a great idea, but I'm not that crazy about "spooky energy at a distance"...
The interaction of different wavelenghts with matter is an extremely complex thing, no monotonous relation here. This is why e.g. microwave fucks with the blood brain barrier, putting chemicals like albumin there (google it) and uv does not.
What happens to people if they are surrounded by these charges?
10 meters is not near field at 5.8 GHz. That's the essence of why this won't work efficiently and as you say, it exposes all kinds of other things to high intensity radiation, which would cause myriad problems. This technology won't work, will probably never even be approved by the FCC (or any other country's regulatory agency) and anybody who invests in it is a fool.
So, 90% loss of power used at 10 feet. But hey, at least I don't have to get up and walk over to that wall socket to charge my cellphone. Mind you, now my wireless doesn't work for some reason, so my phone's using a lot less power with no wi-fi active. Win-win!
"Despite the fact that no one’s heard of Ossia, the Cota prototype in its current form already managed to deliver power wirelessly to devices over distances of around 10 feet, delivering around 10 percent of the total original source power to recipient devices using the same unlicensed spectrum that powers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and other wireless communication standards."
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
This whole idea is neat but just won't work. The premise is that there are lots of high-power devices out there which have really crappy battery life. Phone battery life is steadily improving and Qi etc. does just about everything you need.
These people are assuming that in 5 years phone battery life will be crappier than it is now and it will just be essential to have this.
The only thing this could be useful for is powering lots of little IOT devices, but I feel like this is just a really inefficient way of doing that. And IOT devices won't really be a big deal until they are powered by ambient thermal energy and RF.
Look up the photoelectric effect. It does, in fact, say exactly that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
I was referring to the sun, which delivers around 1000W / m2 (according to wikipedia), and to parent's implication that wifi has significant biological effects (it does not, especially given that it is generally in the 30-100mW range-- around 0.01% of the sun's output on earth).
Its not omnidirectional, they use beamforming, and they demonstrated it working. You COULD have read the article instead of speculating, but there you go.
The patent states they will aim the antennae in the charging device at the receiver. This will make it a $100 charger for only one device at the time. Given the fact that people have at least a dozen chargers per person wandering around the house these days, often using several at the same time, you'll have to have a cupboard of these in the average family home to keep all your devices charged. At 1W effective charging energy, possibly more. Also, your devices probably won't charge a whole lot if you move around, since the transmitter antennae won't be aimed at it, so you may still need to charge them another way as well.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
OK, let's take a closer look.
The issued patent from the application linked above is US 8,446,248. The claims are quite narrow, because, over five years of rejections and reexaminations, the USPTO examiners found prior art and narrowed the patent coverage.
Back in 2003, Geoffery Landis at NASA (also a visiting professor of aeronautics at MIT and an SF writer with a Hugo) proposed something similar, and that was patented. The NASA patent says "The present inventive technique provides for wireless, charging power and/or primary power to electronic/electrical devices whereby microwave energy is employed. The microwave energy is focused by one or more adaptively-phased microwave array emitters in a power transmitter portion of the system onto a device to be charged. Rectennas within the device to be charged receive and rectify the microwave energy and use it for battery charging and/or for primary power. A locator signal generated by the device to be charged is analyzed by the system to determine the location of the device to be charged relative to the microwave array emitters, permitting the microwave energy to be directly specifically towards the device to be charged.". That's the basic idea here.
The Landis patent gives a much clearer idea of the concept. It's simply a steerable microwave beam aimed at the receiver. That's known to transmit power just fine. You could do that with a mechanically steered dish. There are some tricks; one is noticing backscatter from the beam, indicating that it's hitting something that isn't a receiver, so stop aiming there. Another is finding the receiver with low power, then upping the power once on target. Much of this is borrowed from the solar power satellite scheme of the 1980s, with ground based "rectennas", which is why this came out of NASA.
There's a safety issue. The US safety standard for microwave exposure is 10 mW/cm^2 for periods of 0.1-hour or more. To get 1 watt at the receiver, it's going to take maybe 10 watts of output at the transmitter. If the emitting area is about two square meters, as in his demo, the energy is spread out over 20,000 cm^2, so there's only about 0.5mW/cm^2 in front of the transmitter array. That's OK.
At the receiver end, all that power is supposed to be focused to a point, or at least down to the size of his little box. That should focus at least 1 or 2 watts onto his little box, with maybe 25cm^2 area. Now we're up to 40 to 80 mW/cm^2, which is well above the safe limit for prolonged exposure. Since you may be wearing or carrying that little box, and it's going to take a while to charge the battery, this isn't too good.
It's a nice demo, but a system which focuses microwave power beams on handheld devices probably isn't going to be acceptable. What it looks like he did here was to gang together a lot of off the shelf devices which individually can't emit enough power to be dangerous, but when combined into a phased array put too much power in one place.
Something tells me your kids aren't immunized.
It goes beyond thermal effects. This scares the day lights out of me. RF is an energy source, an invisible one, when it flows through human tissue, it has been shown to push and apply force to tissue. Dr. Carole Smith has talked about the government using terahertz radiation (similar to microwave energy) for remote brain and environment scans, and mind reading tech, and in that case, she says the radiation, even though non-ionizing, would pose the risk of stretching and dehydrating tissue, even neurons.
Dr. Carole Smith article: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/intrusive-brain-reading-surveillance-technology-hacking-the-mind-by-carole-smith/
The brain and nervous system also respond to electromagnetic energy, and it can cause hallucinations and discomfort. People can also feel radiation on their bodies/on their skin, even the sensation of light. I just wanted to point out that there are other risks to this technology than just the risk of being heated. It could even permanently damage or alter your brain, by stretching neurons or having other effects on the soft tissue the longer you're around the source of energy (It even inhibits and interferes with nerve function.) Cause, microwaves/photons create drag on cells, can push/pull it around. More powerful versions of this technology can be used to hurt a person from afar, to damage a persons mind, or beam voices and other signals direct into the mind, and the NSA has that patented (NSA Signals Intelligence Electronic Brain Link/Remote Neural Monitoring).
link : http://www.oregonstatehospital.net/d/russelltice-nsarnmebl.html
If it weren't for the convenience of electricity, and the money involved.. we might ban it, because it might actually be responsible for many human and animal illnesses and defects. People in the city who are closest to the strongest of these signals for example have a much higher chance of getting schizophrenia, whereas people in the country do not tend to develop the disorder at such a higher rate. We do know that electromagnetic energy causes hallucinations directly and destabilizes and interferes with brain function, as it disrupts the ability of the brain to operate normally, interfering with it's signaling process and what have you.
Okay, so they are going to use a phased array transmitter to focus energy on the receiver. But what if my phone's charging in my pocket, and I have a small key or something that's a half wavelength long? Is it going to resonate and burn my dick?
Said difference is measured in ,,Watt''.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What kind of super-ionization will it do to our body cells ?
None, because photons with energy on the order of 1-10 ueV don't ionize anything.
Ezekiel 23:20
The article mentions miniaturization from a 6 foot (~184 cm) containing 200 antennas to an 18 inch cube containing 20,000 antennas--while this is possible (maybe) to build, it simply will not work.
Phased array beam-forming requires a minimum distance between transmitters in order to both form the wave and to reduce the mutual coupling between antennas. (Mutual coupling is a near-field phenomena that can significantly degrade antenna performance: for example, mutual coupling = -3dB means 50% of the transmitted power form one antenna is absorbed back into the circuit of the adjacent antenna).
Most antenna phased array systems assume a minimum separation distance of half-wavelength between antennas in order to achieve mutual coupling below -15 dB. At 2.4 GHz, the wavelength is roughly 12cm, so the minimum separation distance in free space is 6cm. Assuming they use FR4 as the PCB material to support the antennas, the physical separation can be reduced to roughly 3cm between antennas (Rogers is another material with dielectric constant of 10, but very expensive). The current size of their transmitter is 184cm tall, so it is conceivable that if the width is at least 6cm, it is possible to contain 200 transmitters. (However this is basically a vertical phased array--this means the beam-scanning is mostly in the vertical orientation--very little ability to perform horizontal beam-forming).
Now, examine the 18 inch cube with 20,000 antennas: They will conceivably place transmitters along the all 6 sides. Each side has a surface area of roughly 45 x 45 cm and will contain roughly 3,300 antennas. Assuming the antennas are miniaturized such that each antenna length is ~ 1 cm, then each side of the cube can support roughly 256 antennas with optimal mutual coupling. If each side were to contain over 3,000 antennas, the separation would decrease to almost zero, resulting in mutual coupling close to 100%; thereby rendering the system useless.
Note: All the antennas would need to be placed along the surface of the cube, if more antennas were placed inside, the transmitted power from the inner antennas would just get absorbed by the outer layers.
Thermal damage could still be an issue. For example 42C doesn't feel that hot to touch, but a lot of things in our body don't work so well at that temperature...
If you only get small localized hotspots in your brain you might get damaged without noticing it at first.
Wait till they start stealing your power as well!
Bob.
So he claims 10% at 10 feet - so lets assume 10 watts input power
A 10 foot sphere has a surface area of 1257 sqft
1 watt over 1257 sqft is 0.0008 watts per sqft
Lets be generous and assume the whole of the phone case is a receiver.
A phone is about 10 inches sq, so a bit under 1/14th of a sqft.
0.0008/14 = 0.000057 watts. That isn't going to be much power for your phone.
That also assumes you left your phone facing the transmitter rather than edge on.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
He was standing right there I tell you.. really.. in the center of that big black greasy spot.. just a minute ago.
That's always the issue, but you'd notice that long before thermal ionization would occur. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
The only way this concept makes sense to me is that you use some of those 20K transmitters for each direction, essentially. Rather than broadcasting omnidirectionally, you could use wifi in the device to track it down and beam power in a relatively narrow band towards it. Thus you could significantly reduce the power requirement. I still don't know how he thinks it will avoid being absorbed by other objects.
I don't really know why he's making such a big deal out of an idea so old, without having any actual product, though. Also, what do you do if the 2.4 GHz signal is picked up by your phone's wifi antenna? I assume that jams it, if not cooks it.
So if I am unwillingly charging my neighbors devices I would be paying for their energy consumption.
How would the energy bill be distributed Or we would have to encrypt the wireless power !
Wonderful idea for dealing with nasty neighbors!
my safe word is "Do it to Julia!"
Yo mamma!
Time to break out the tin foil hats. Like a baked potatoe.
If so, then we have solved world hunger and overpopulation in one fell swoop! Maybe the Morlocks were on to something :P
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
Directional radio has gotten cheap and common (enough so to go into commodity WAPs); could that be used to reduce the area of effect from 1200ish m^2 (full sphere surface) to something more on the 0.25m^2 level? Which would reduce the power to something on the order of 100W. Still high, definitely, but at least feasible to plug into the wall :)
Pork, actually. You got the animal right, at least.
Ye gods, think of the real-life StarCraft games you could play with little scale-model robots and buildings using this.