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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.
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.
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.
"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?
My friend's father is part of the team that developed this. It's safe (according to him).
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
Let's just say I wouldn't wear a red shirt around this thing...
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.
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
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.
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 !
"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.
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.
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.
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
Stealing power is one problem, another is if a hacker can get all the chargers in an area to sum to 100W or more at a target ;).