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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?
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
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
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.
No, because the sun bombards us with far more of that crap than a 30mW router will.
Heres a nice summary
Im not sure why radio isnt listed, but infrared, visible, and ultraviolet are all more energetic and "damaging" than radio waves.
The total amount of energy received at ground level from the sun at the zenith is 1004 watts per square meter, which is composed of 527 watts of infrared radiation, 445 watts of visible light, and 32 watts of ultraviolet radiation.
So a few watts of power floating around your home is probably not that much to worry about.
Also, those two links you provided are both from primary school students--not even highschoolers-- so Im gonna say its probably not on the same level as the existing evidence against WiFi causing harm.
Not really. That was an *extremely* poorly controlled experiment by grade school students. Magically, no one else has produced similar results in an actual controlled study.
If your *only* evidence is a single experiment performed by individuals with barely rudimentary training in the sciences, you might want to consider that it is your bias causing you to readily accept the outlier as opposed to the norm.